Sitting in a cramped, arse-numbing Lutyens church in Golders Green is not the ideal way to experience the UK premiere of one of the more curious musicological unearthings of recent years, though the Hampstead and Highgate festival deserves a medal for allowing us to hear The Philosopher's Stone in the first place. Premiered anonymously in Vienna in 1790, the opera soon vanished into limbo - where it might have remained had not American scholar David Buch discovered it to be a composite on which no less than five composers collaborated. Four have been relegated to the footnotes of musical history. The fifth happened to be Mozart.
The text (and some of the music) was by Emmanuel Schikaneder, who wrote the libretto for The Magic Flute, for which The Philosopher's Stone was, in some respects, a trial run. Allowing for shifts in gender, its plot - blending fairy tale, Freemasonic symbolism and whiffs of ancient Egyptian religion - is roughly the same. The benevolent, if emotionally-wounded deity Astromonte and his evil brother Eutifronte, battle for the life-conferring talisman of the title and for the souls of two contrasting pairs of human lovers, the aristocratic, virginal Nadir and Nadine, and the proletarian Lubano and his promiscuous wife Lubanera.
The score, however, has none of the sublimity or numinous quality of the later opera. Given that five composers were involved, it does have a remarkable homogeneity of style, though Mozart's own contribution (10 minutes in a work lasting well over two hours) stands out a mile in terms of subtlety and emotional ambivalence. What is apparent, however, is that Mozart clearly learned from its flaws. Having an Osirian deity like Astromonte spouting stratospheric coloratura is a bit hard to take. Eutifronte, meanwhile, is an eloquent bass. In The Magic Flute, the musical polarities of good and evil are mercifully reversed in Sarastro's cavernous pronouncements and the Queen of the Night's bravura demonism.
The performance, a concert version in an English translation by Barry Millington, is a hit-and-miss labour of love. Both Graeme Danby (Eutifronte) and Augustin Prunell-Friend (Astromonte, struggling with the role) camped it up rotten, when the piece should be taken seriously. The quartet of human lovers fared better. Carolyn Sampson's pure, crystalline Nadine sharply contrasted with Nicki Kennedy's deliciously sensual Lubanera. Nadir's hideously difficult, high-lying music was phrased with great beauty, if occasional strain, by Huw Rhys-Evans. Harry Bicket, favouring extreme speeds, conducted the Collegium Musicum 90, who compensated for some dodgy ensemble with some beautifully poised woodwind and brass solos.
