The Cunning Little Vixen, Opéra National de Paris, 28 June 2010

Opéra Bastille

Forester – Jean-Philippe Lafont
Forester’s Wife, Owl – Michèle Lagrange
Schoolmaster – Luca Lombardo
Parson – Gregory Reinhart
Harašta – Paul Gay
Vixen – Adriana Kucerova
Fox – Hannah Esther Minutillo
Innkeeper’s Wife – Anne-Sophie Ducret
Dog – Letitia Singleton
Rooster, Jay – Elisa Cenni
Woodpecker – Ghislaine Roux
Mosquito – Paul Crémazy
Crested Hen – Natacha Finette Constantin
Badger – Slawomir Szychiowak

André Engel (director)
Nicky Rieti (designer)
Elizabeth Neumuller (costumes)
André Diot (lighting)
Françoise Grès (choreography)

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris
Atelier Lyrique de l’Opéra national de Paris
Maîtrise des Hauts-de-Seine
Children’s chorus of the Opéra national de Paris
Alessandro di Stefano (chorus master)
Michael Schønwandt (conductor)

I enjoyed this production very much first time around at the Bastille, in 2008, an earlier version of the production having been mounted at the Opéra de Lyon in 2000. It was not the least of Gérard Mortier’s virtues to have mounted the Paris Opéra’s first ever Cunning Little Vixen – or, as it is known in France, La Petite Renarde rusée. The particular virtues of André Engel’s production would have made it well worth seeing, even if it had not been such an historical occasion. (Janáček’s greatness has not been self-evident to everyone, or almost everyone, until surprisingly recently.) And so, it was pleasing to be reminded of the fine balances Engel and his production team – not least designer, Nicky Rieti – uphold between Nature and man, whether in portrayal of the animal characters themselves or the relationship between those characters and the human world, and also between animate and inanimate. The railway line remains an apt summation of the fraught quality of that latter relationship, and also provides a specific yet not-too-specific sense of location, which can be slightly varied as required. Passing of the seasons remains simply yet tellingly observed. Cycles of various sorts are crucial to the success of this opera, as Bill Bryden’s recently revived production for Covent Garden testified. And yet, there felt something a little tired, end-of-season-ish to the proceedings. I do not wish to exaggerate, but the sharpness of direction was not always quite as it had been – and I do not think this is just because I was seeing the production for a second time. There was something of the feeling of a repertoire production: not the end of the world, but a pity nevertheless.

Adriana Kucerova (Vixen), Elisa Cenni (Rooster), and Natacha Finette Constantin (Crested Hen)

Images: Opéra national de Paris/ Christian Leiber

This was often the case with the musical performances too. Again, nothing was bad, but taken as a whole, this was not a performance on the same standard as that I saw in 2008, happily preserved on DVD. (I have not seen it on that medium, but should imagine it would transfer very well.) Adriana Kucerova, replacing Elena Tsallagova, proved for the most part a winning Vixen, and Hannah Esther Minutillo reprised her Fox with style and commitment. Yet the chemistry was not quite so apparent between them, and their duetting could at times tend towards the shrill (partly a matter of orchestral support too). Standing out, as so often, was the Forester, in this case portrayed by Jean-Philippe Lafont. Bluffer than one often encounters, one could yet find credibility in this character, and follow his own transformation through communion with Nature. Choral singing, not least that of the children’s choirs, was generally of a high standard. Singing in Czech caused them no problem at all, so far as one could discern.

The orchestra generally sounded marvellous on its own terms, strings gleaming, woodwind and brass equally impressive. Yet Michael Schønwandt’s conducting tended too much towards a generalised late-Romantic sound, missing the piquancy and bite of Janáček’s harmony and orchestration. At times, as if to compensate, he drove the score along too brusquely, before reverting to undue, slightly distorting emphasis upon kinship with Wagner and Strauss. Bringing out such a relationship is an interesting, perfectly valid strategy, but too often it proved to be at the expense of the composer’s individuality. For instance, the third act horns sounded straight out of Siegfried – or Der Freischütz. I should be the last to complain in principle, but this composer needs ultimately to speak in his own vernacular idiom, the Böhmischer Wald standing both close to and distant from Janáček’s Moravian countryside. Schønwandt also displayed a habit of pausing too long between sections: continuity is rightly prized here, heightening rather than lessening the characterful musical shifts, rhythmic and harmonic, within scenes. He sounded as though he would have been happier conducting Lohengrin.

The Cunning Little Vixen, Opéra national de Paris, 4 November 2008

(Images copyright: B. Uhlig/ Opéra national de Paris)

Opéra Bastille

Forester – Jukka Rasilainen
Forester’s wife – Michèle Lagrange
Schoolmaster – David Kuebler
Parson – Roland Bracht
Harašta – Paul Gay
Vixen – Elena Tsallagova
Fox – Hannah Esther Minutillo

André Engel (director)
Nicky Rieti (designer)
Elizabeth Neumuller (costumes)
André Diot (lighting)

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris
Atelier Lyrique de l’Opéra national de Paris
Maîtrise des Hauts-de-Seine
Children’s chorus of the Opéra national de Paris
Alessandro di Stefano (chorus master)
Dennis Russell Davies (conductor)

This is, perhaps surprisingly, the Paris Opéra’s first production of The cunning little vixen. But then Janáček’s greatness has not been widely recognised for so long as one might expect. Early performances tended to be the preserve of Czech performers, with a few German exceptions. To take the standard-bearer of later twentieth-century modernism, it is not quite true to say that Pierre Boulez has only come now to the music of Janáček. As early as 1973, he conducted the Lachian Dances in New York. (The concert also featured music by Handel, Mozart, and Copland; recordings can readily mislead as to the breadth or otherwise of an artist’s repertoire.) This nevertheless proved an exception and it is only much later that Janáček has come to feature more regularly, if hardly frequently, in his programmes. A Prom this year marked, I think, the first opportunity – and I shall be pleased to be corrected – for a British audience to experience his Janáček. Moreover, it was only in 1978 that a collected edition was begun. Sir Charles Mackerras has of course proved an indefatigable champion from his Sadler’s Wells days onwards and Bernard Haitink conducted more than one might have expected whilst at Covent Garden. Gérard Mortier has certainly done his bit for the cause whilst at the helm in Paris, as he did in Salzburg too. This production must be accounted another success for his régime as it enters its final year.

The production comes from more or less the same team that brought us the estimable Paris Cardillac. André Engel, Nicky Rieti, and Andre Diot are common to both. This is clearly a team that has a sense of theatre. (What should be a given is far from always so.) It is, moreover, evidently willing to consider its approach according to the work and the circumstances rather than to impose a ‘house style’, irrespective of requirements. (Achim Freyer’s Eugene Onegin, anyone?) I say that, since a sense of theatre apart, the two productions did not have anything startlingly obvious in common. Where Cardillac had been highly stylish, there was something winningly homespun here, to appeal – in that tedious cliché – to children of all ages, but not only to do that. Amidst the apparent wide-eyed naïveté of the bright sets and delightful, anthropomorphic-but-not-too-anthropomorphic animals, serious and apposite points were made concerning the cycle of life and the somewhat fraught relationship between man and the natural world. (In the case of this opera, one might say vice versa too.) We saw the turning of the seasons – and almost felt them, the music helping very much here, of course. And the turning of the seasons, as in Haydn’s oratorio of that name, is also a metaphor for the stages of life, the first intimations of spring at the end moving as they should. The railway line running through each scene was not, as it might sound in abstracto, a merely fashionable device, but visible evidence of the impact of man upon Nature. It was not taken any further than that, turning a delightful work into a self-righteously environmentalist tract, but it nevertheless made us think.

The orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris sounded at least as good as it had for Tristan the previous evening, if anything even better. An especial delight was the vernally fresh woodwind, with the brass boasting an impressive night too. Early on, we heard fanfares that looked forward to the Sinfonietta, whilst the fine quartet of horns in the third act approached perfection. Dennis Russell Davies proved a steady hand at the helm. To start with, I missed a little of the lingering Romanticism that one can often hear in Janáček. However, as the evening progressed, I heard more, not a bad metaphor for the blossoming of the vixen herself. Rhythms, with the very occasional exception, were taut and the structure was admirably clear. Elena Tsallagova showed herself as agile of voice as she was on stage, in the title role. Her rapport with Hannah Esther Minutillo’s Fox was genuinely moving, whatever reservations one might entertain in principle about a couple of foxes falling in love. All of the other parts were taken with gusto; character acting and character singing were quite rightly to the fore. And the multifarious choral and silent movement parts were equally impressive: a tribute to a genuine company achievement.

Cardillac, Opéra National de Paris, 29 January 2008

Opéra Bastille

Cardillac – Franz Grundheber
The Daughter – Angela Denoke
The Officer – Christopher Ventris
The Lady – Hannah Esther Minutillo
The Cavalier – Charles Workman
The Gold Dealer – Roland Bracht
Leader of the Prévôté – David Bizic

Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris

Kazushi Ono (conductor)

Winfried Maczewski (chorus master)

André Engel (producer)
Nicky Rieti (designer)
Chantel de La Coste Messelière (costumes)
André Diot (lighting)
Frédérique Chauveaux and Françoise Grès (choreographers)

Perhaps only Paris could turn in so stylish a production of the terminally unfashionable Hindemith. When I saw this in 2006, I thought that the Opéra National de Paris had a hit on its hands, and I have no reason to revise my judgement upon its revival. Cardillac, based on Das Fräulein von Scuderi, a short story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, is a work imbued with Neue Sachlichkeit. It nevertheless looks forward to the chief preoccupation of works such as Mathis der Maler and Die Harmonie der Welt, namely the artist’s role in society. The musical style, however, remains very much of the 1920s: for the most part resolutely anti-sentimental and with a duly ‘objective’ instrumental polyphony characteristic, perhaps misconceived but genuinely held, of that age’s conception of Bach.

Kazushi Ono seemed very much on Hindemith’s wavelength in this respect. Anxious to relieve music of its subservience to the text Hindemith – somewhat like Busoni and even Berg in this respect – insisted upon small closed instrumental forms, following their own musical imperatives. Whilst not dissociated from what was going on onstage, Ono ensured that the motorised rhythms and the manifold polyphonic strands were possessed of their own motivation. His reading may not have evinced throughout quite the rhythmic drive – there were a few occasions when the tension sagged ever so slightly – brought to the score by Kent Nagano during the original production, but this is a minor criticism. The orchestra responded superbly: incisive and possessed of just the right wind- and percussion-dominated sound. (The strings, especially violins, are very few in number, to impart an almost Weill-like quality to the music.) A sure command of idiom was unfailingly apparent.

Franz Grundheber proved a charismatic Cardillac. His tone, his attention to the text, and equally importantly, bearing on stage were all exemplary. For the drama to be of consequence, one needs to believe in his tortured, Jekyll-and-Hyde conflict between his work and everything else, his daughter included. One certainly did in this case. Angela Denoke was every bit as impressive as his daughter; it is difficult to imagine her command of line and tone in this role bettered. As her suitor, Christopher Ventris also impressed – more so in the second than in the third act – although he was arguably outshone by Charles Workman in the smaller tenor role of the dashing Cavalier. The stage and vocal chemistry between the latter and the alluring Hannah Esther Minutillo as the Lady was an object lesson in such matters. One could all too well understand why he felt compelled to follow her fateful entreaty to procure for her ‘the finest object Cardillac ever produced,’ and why she in her turn was only too eager to await him in her bedroom. The chorus, attentively directed and choreographed, was every bit as impressive in its vocal blend and diction. It plays a crucial role – partly a homage to Bach’s Passions and Handel’s oratorios? – both at the opening and during the final scene, thus framing the action within a broader social context. It was no mean achievement for almost every word to be distinguishable, all the more impressive given the fullness of choral tone and the quantity of stage business.

The production was, as I have already mentioned, extremely stylish. The updating – to roughly the time of composition – worked well enough, although there were occasions, such as the beginning of the third act, when it became a little confusing. Nevertheless, the general impression of gold-fuelled opulence was most persuasive, as were all aspects of the Personenregie. The sets and costumes were lavish, which seemed not an extravagance but a necessary attribute of the action. A welcome aspect of the production was that it helped to remove any lingering prejudices one might have entertained about dryness or worthiness on the composer’s part. This was splendid musical theatre and must be accounted a triumph for Gérard Mortier’s house and company.