The Royal College of Music's first opera of the season, The Cunning Little Vixen has some excellent singing and first-class playing from the student orchestra.
Rattle conducts Janáček's glorious score with unerring skill and barely concealed adoration, but is let down by his regular collaborator's muddy vision.
The sets, costumes, and venue contribute to the atmosphere, but it's the singing and playing of Janáček's enchanting music that make West Edge Opera's The Cunning Little Vixen magical.
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,
The Vienna State Opera’s revival if their 2014 production of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen with conductor Tomáš Netopil vividly realises the glowing colours of the composer's great affirmation of the eternal vigour of nature.
The National Theatre in Prague should be the second-best place in the world to see Leoš Janáček's charming opera The Cunning Little Vixen. But its current production, new in the repertoire this season, is such a disappointment.
Generally, opera doesn’t give old age much of a look-in, but the closing scene of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, written in Janáček’s old age, is an exception, as the Forester muses on the passing of time and the renewing cycle of life. In today’s Juilliard School production, Aubrey Allicock gave us the most touching and thoughtful of renderings.
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.
The teaming up of RSAMD’s best students with Scottish Opera has now become a much-anticipated annual event: in a showcase of best practice, it demonstrates how a national opera company can work together with a national music conservatoire to provide immensely valuable experience, and a chance for the youngsters to work right alongside the professionals on stage, off stage and in the pit.
