The Berlin Philharmonic Stages a Musically Glorious ‘Vixen’

[lennygoran]

Not the kind of event I would be interested in but I do love the opera. Regards, Len

Review: The Berlin Philharmonic Stages a Musically Glorious ‘Vixen’

By CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM OCT. 17, 2017


BERLIN — In the final act of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” a litter of fox cubs comes upon a dead hare that carries a whiff of human scent. Their mother warns her young that the carcass is bait, and mocks the person who laid such an obvious trap. But moments later she runs into the Hunter, who kills her with one shot of his rifle.

This may be an opera dominated by animals, but as you might be able to tell, it avoids cuteness. And Peter Sellars’s semistaging at the Philharmonie here avoided that trap, too, only to get caught up in a tangle of contradictions.

The musically glorious performance, with Simon Rattle conducting his Berlin Philharmonic, marked the latest collaboration between Mr. Rattle and Mr. Sellars, but it lacked the emotional directness of their acclaimed “ritualizations” of the Bach Passions. That the evening nevertheless held moments of aching tenderness and heat was due mostly to Lucy Crowe’s rendition of the feisty, vulnerable and erotically vibrant Vixen and to Mr. Rattle’s bighearted reading of the simmering, light-flecked score.

In 1922, Janacek began writing this short opera about love, death and freedom among the animal and human denizens of a forest. Since then, Disney animations have assumed such a firm monopoly on stories featuring anthropomorphized animals that “Vixen” productions often seem fixated on avoiding anything excessively coy or droll.


The work is rife with nuances, especially in the blurred relationship between the human and animal worlds. Does each mirror or threaten the other? Is there a social subtext about exploitation? Or a psychological one, grounded in the Jungian concept of animals representing layers of the human self? Mr. Sellars hedges his bets.

The characters all wear slouchy everyday clothes, so that the distinction between man and beast comes through only in body language. Some singers rose to the challenge with wit and abandon: I won’t soon forget the sly pleasure with which Ms. Crowe jiggles her tailbone as if to mark the badger’s lair. But I would have wished for more distinction between the roles played by the tenor Burkhard Ulrich, whose impersonations of a mosquito, a rooster and a schoolmaster were confusingly close.


Dressing the animals in human garb heightened the pathos of the opera’s early scenes, when the Forester (the butter-smooth baritone Gerald Finley) carries off the young Vixen to keep as a pet. As she cried out for her mother, the audience seemed to be witnessing a human abduction. And in the following scenes, the production seemed to find its sharp edge, as the Forester’s relationship with the domesticated Vixen flickers between abuse and mutual, animalistic attraction.

However, with the second act, in which the escaped Vixen finds emancipation and love, the staging settled into a drearier vein. Screens to the side of the stage displayed unexceptional images of nature — trembling leaves, gurgling water, a mosquito feasting on skin — that paled next to the richness with which Janacek renders those images in music. With the appearance of the Fox, sung with succulent clarity by the soprano Angela Denoke, the Vixen finds a mate that is her equal. Though their love duet was affecting, any dramatic tension that had built up in the scenes with the Forester fell away.

The Vixen’s death was searing. But the final scene, in which the Forester, ruing her loss, recognizes one of her young and takes comfort in the cycle of life, seemed anticlimactically mild. In Janacek’s final stage direction, the Forester’s gun slips out of his grip; here, it just lay next to him unheeded — an odd choice by Mr. Sellars, who normally seizes any opportunity to tease out a contemporary political point.



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/arts ... collection

[John F]

The New York Philharmonic staged a musically glorious "Vixen" here a few years ago, without being lumbered with Peter Sellars. You didn't like it for some reason.

[lennygoran]

The New York Philharmonic staged a musically glorious "Vixen" here a few years ago, without being lumbered with Peter Sellars. You didn't like it for some reason.

John I don't think that's the case-we saw a Vixen at Julliard we liked and that you and Maria R hated-what I did hate was the NY Phil Le Grand Macabre--György Ligeti's only opera--thank goodness! We paid a lot to be too far back and didn't even get surtitles-maybe the closest I've ever come to walking out of a performance. My memory has failed me on this? Regards, Len