Mitridate, re di Ponto, opera review: Superb spectacle from the young maestro

If Mitridate had been Mozart’s only opera, he’d be no more than a footnote in operatic history, albeit a startling one: he was just 14 years old when he wrote the nearly four hours of music that the opera requires.

Even if it never escapes opera seria convention, with its impenetrably tangled rivalries, both amorous and political, Mozart’s music is charming, exciting, dramatically insightful. Much better was to come, but Mitridate is far more than mere juvenilia.

Graham Vick’s Royal Opera production – first seen on December 5 1991, exactly 200 years after Mozart’s death – throws gender distinctions into disarray with cheerful abandon, matching seria artifice with its own volatile blend of Indian kathakali, Japanese kabuki and Western camp.

Paul Brown’s designs come up dazzlingly bright, while Ron Howell’s choreography, involving a small platoon of supernumeraries, is exuberant and thrilling.

It could all seem extraneous, were it not for Vick’s skill in managing performers. Every singer is entirely part of the spectacle, their exaggerated movements and costumes made to seem entirely natural. So too is the singing, despite the monstrous demands Mozart makes.

Lucy Crowe stands out for idiomatic vocal beauty married to refined stage presence, while Christophe Rousset, making his Royal Opera debut, conducts with panache to match the effervescence of the production.

Until July 7, Royal Opera House; roh.org.uk