Janáček The Cunning Little Vixen 3

March 22, 2010

The Cunning Little Vixen at Covent Garden
It seems extraordinary that this is the first time that Sir Charles Mackerras has conducted this opera at Covent Garden

Hilary Finch (Times)

A heart-rending sob and a wail rose up from the auditorium. Vixen Sharp-Ears had been shot dead — and for one little girl in the audience, it was all too much.

Janácek would have approved. His transformation of newspaper cartoons into a visionary opera of man’s place in the natural world makes The Cunning Little Vixen the eternally moving work that it is. In this revival of Bill Bryden’s 1990 Royal Opera production, with Charles Mackerras playing the heartstrings of the music for all they’re worth, there’s a high level of audience engagement. Good, too, to have a chance to hear the opera that Janácek wrote just after Kátya Kabanová, which is now playing in St Martin’s Lane.

Bryden’s production hovers somewhere between Kenneth Grahame and Frederick Ashton in Beatrix Potter mode. Virtuoso animal masks and costumes, a balletic Blue Dragonfly (Tom Sapsford), a lunar trapeze artist (Lyn Routledge) incarnating the free Spirit of the Vixen: all weave in and out of movement (Stuart Hopps) as deliciously detailed in its verisimilitude as Janácek’s own aural study of the language of birds, animals and insects.

It seems extraordinary that this is the first time that Mackerras has conducted this opera at Covent Garden. Such is his love for, and understanding of, the score that one can feel just a little short-changed at the end, when the orchestra’s crescendo of pantheistic transcendence isn’t quite captured in this production. William Dudley’s visual emphasis on the great wheel of life and the cogwheels of time comes slightly at the expense of a sense of wonder-filled renewal within the cycle of nature’s seasons.

This revival may not be as starrily cast as some — and the poor Fox (Emma Bell) had her appendix out on the eve of the first night. But Jette Parker Young Artists are always on hand and Elisabeth Meister made a brave, if as yet vocally undernourished, stab at the role of Fox Golden-Mane. Emma Matthews offers an impressive house debut as the Vixen herself: a feisty feminist, red in tooth and claw, yet with a touching vulnerability at the core of her bright, high soprano.

The Vixen’s longings (both despised and envied by the Dachshund, nicely lugubrious in the voice of the American countertenor Gerald Thompson) personify those of less successful specimens of mankind. Robin Leggate is a wonderfully observed Schoolmaster (and Mosquito); Jeremy White an angrily morose Priest (and Badger); and Christopher Maltman, though still small-scale, is personable and musically intelligent in his first Forester. A word, too, for the Forester’s Wife, the mezzo Madeleine Shaw, who is also an irresistibly censorious Owl.