The Cunning Little Vixen, Glyndebourne, review

Melly Still’s new production of Janacek's masterpiece achieves a delicate balance between whimsy and mysticism

By Rupert Christiansen 21 May 2012 • 12:09pm

Brush with danger: Lucy Crowe as Vixen Sharp Ears

With its abundance of exuberant charm and frolicsome furry creatures, there’s always a danger that The Cunning Little Vixen can end up seeming cutely Disneyfied, leaving Janacek’s broader and deeper intentions unexplored.

For this is not a kiddies’ romp, but an opera with a fiercely serious theme – closely related to that of The Makropoulos Case – which puts death at the heart of life, and asserts that the passing of an individual soul matters little in the face of the self-renewing cycle of nature. The heroic Vixen may be obliterated by a gunshot, but her offspring are joyously ready to keep the comedy of existence rolling, and in the opera’s exultant finale, Gaia triumphs over all.

Melly Still’s new production is cannily successful at holding this delicate balance between whimsy and mysticism: the stage picture sometimes becomes a tad too busily keen to please, but sentimentality is kept at bay by an underlying whiff of something not only red in tooth and claw but distinctly on heat too, embodied in Lucy Crowe’s glowingly sung Vixen – probably a menace to society and stubborn and stroppy to boot, yet quite literally a life force.

Tom Pye’s Hockneyish designs are evocative of a world of childish wonder, with animal costumes which cleverly suggest human characteristics (the Vixen holds her tail in her hand and manipulates it like a bladed weapon). The way the performers negotiate the steeply raked zig-zagging path (doubling up as a fox’s burrow) at the rear of the set is a small miracle of theatrical trickery, and Paule Constable’s lighting is quite magical too.

Vladimir Jurowski’s gloriously confident conducting of the London Philharmonic is the evening’s other outstanding virtue. Sometimes – as in Meistersinger here last year – I’ve felt that Jurowski’s penetrating intelligence takes too tight a grip on the music and ends up wringing it dry. Not here, however, where the maestro appeared to relax and enjoy himself, allowing warmth and sweetness as well as clarity and precision to shine through.

The production’s supporting cast is adequate if not outstanding, with Emma Bell playing the Fox as a hippie fugitive from Haight-Ashbury and Sergei Leiferkus as the Forester. My only substantial reservation is the regrettable way that the traditional Glyndebourne dinner break means that the interval (positioned half way through Act 2) is longer than the opera itself and therefore destructive of dramatic continuity and audience involvement.