Performer: Melly Still

Smyth's rarely performed tale of evil deeds on the Cornish coast provides searing drama marred by poor intelligibility and an overpowering orchestra.

A welcome return to the Glyndebourne Festival for Melly Still's staging, which brings out the full emotional range of Dvořák’s fairytale of denial, heartbreak and forgiveness.

Melly Still returns to revive her 2012 staging at Glyndebourne, laying nature bare. Cartoonish, but never sentimental, it presents Vixen red in tooth and claw, 

Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka, moving between the worlds and rooted in myth, is a shivering opera to experience with its opulent music and its fantastical plot. 

If I were to describe Janáček's late opera The Cunning Little Vixen as a bit of a one-off, I could be accused of severe understatement. It's the only opera in the mainstream repertoire to be based on a cartoon strip, it mixes animals and humans at will and it incorporates dance and mime routines, all against the backdrop of the setting of ancient forest so beloved by middle European romantics.