The Cunning Little Vixen, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 13 June 2012

Glyndebourne Opera House

The Vixen – Lucy Crowe
Fox – Emma Bell
Forester – Sergei Leiferkus
Forester’s Wife, Owl – Jean Rigby
Parson, Badger – Mischa Schelmoianski
Schoolmaster, Mosquito – Adrian Thompson
Harašta – William Dazeley
Innkeeper – Colin Judson
Innkeeper’s Wife – Sarah Pring

Melly Still (director)
Tom Pye (designs)
Dinah Collin (costumes)
Paule Constable (lighting)

Glyndebourne Chorus
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)


A performance of The Cunning Little Vixen can hardly fail to be a joy, and likewise can hardly fail to move. This new production at Glyndebourne – by now, some way into its run – proved no exception. Above all, it would be difficult truly to fault the cast. One may have experienced favoured portrayals in the past, but there was no weak link here, no mean achievement with so multifarious a set of characters. It was good to hear Sergei Leiferkus remain in excellent vocal form as the Forester, even if I found Christopher Maltman at Covent Garden a couple of years ago provided a more individual, deeply moving portrayal. Lucy Crowe was certainly more than a match for her Royal Opera counterpart, Emma Matthews, a little more wayward than often one hears, but none the worse for that. Much the same might be said of Emma Bell, as the Fox. William Dazeley stood out from the rest as Harašta, but, as I said, there were no disappointments at all.

I was less sure about Vladimir Jurowski’s direction of the London Philharmonic. Jurowski’s disinclination to Romanticise the score was perfectly justified, though by the same token, there is nothing wrong with bringing out the echoes of Strauss and early Schoenberg. Similarly, there is much to be said for an approach that brings out the radical disjunctures in Janáček’s writing. Nevertheless, one needs a balance, or perhaps better a dialectic, between those disjunctures and the greater whole. There were occasions, and I do not wish to exaggerate, when the scales seemed unduly weighted towards the former. Unfortunately, this came into greatest relief at the end, when the ecstasy of Janáček’s closing bars seemed to have come almost from nowhere; the temptation to Romanticise seemed to have taken over to a degree that did not tally with the rest of the performance. Work in progress, perhaps, or maybe an indication that other late Janáček works, such as The Makropulos Case or From the House of the Dead might suit Jurowski better. The LPO was on excellent form, though there were times when it might have benefited from a larger body of strings.

Melly Still’s production seemed to have little to say about the work, beyond a slightly puzzling desire to elide the distinction between human and animal worlds. Where other directors, not unreasonably, have seen that as a crucial component of the opera, or have at least problematised the distinction, Still seemed content to present a quasi- and sometimes not-even-quasi-balletic conception of the opera. It was beautiful enough in its æstheticised way, but something more in the way of engagement with the life cycle – I think here especially of André Engel’s Lyon staging, later seen in Paris – would have been welcome. Whether one responded well to the more Carry On-like elements – the translation in the surtitles often veered in that direction too – will have been a matter of taste; I tend to think there is something rather more serious, both delightful and moving, at the core of this wonderful opera. Whether an interval, oddly placed in the middle of the second act, as long as the opera itself is appropriate may also be considered a matter for debate.

The Queen of Spades, Opera North, 22 November 2011

(sung in English)

Barbican Theatre

Lisa – Orla Boylan
Countess – Dame Josephine Barstow
Hermann – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Count Tomsky, Pluto – Jonathan Summers
Prince Yeletsky – William Dazeley
Pauline, Daphnis – Alexandra Sherman
Governess – Fiona Kimm
Chekalinsky – Daniel Norman
Sourin – Julian Tovey
Masha – Gillene Herbert
Chaplitsky – David Llewellyn
Narumov – Dean Robinson
Master of Ceremonies – Paul Rendall
Chloë – Miranda Bevin

Neil Bartlett (director)
Kandis Cook (designs)
Chris Davey (lighting)
Leah Hausman (choreography)

Chorus of Opera North (chorus master: Timothy Burke)
Orchestra of Opera North
Richard Farnes (conductor)

Opera North holds a special place in my affections: my first full opera in the theatre was the company’s Wozzeck, which I saw as a schoolboy at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield. The experience marked me for life. I have never doubted since that Wozzeck is one of the greatest operas ever written, nor have I doubted that opera, whatever the disappointments one may experience in practice, can at its best prove at least as potent a form of drama as any other. It is many years now since I heard a performance from the company, though I have received very good reports from those who have, often comparing its offerings favourably with those on offer from the two principal London houses. I was therefore delighted to have opportunity to see and to hear for myself in Opera North’s first visit to the Barbican Theatre. (More are planned.) The timing was interesting too, affording comparison with Eugene Onegin across town at the Coliseum.
First impressions of Neil Bartlett’s production were preferable to those of Deborah Warner’s Met-bound anodyne crowd-pleaser. There is, at least to begin with, no evident point of view expressed; straightforward storytelling seems the order of the day. By the same token, however, that does not come across as a deliberate policy to play safe, even to condescend. The setting is where it ‘should’ be; costumes are of the period; there is neither jarring nor particular elucidation. It would have been bizarre and not just unwelcome if the audience had followed the practice of a segment of that for Onegin and had drowned out the music by applauding Kandis Cook’s serviceable sets; they simply did their job without ostentation and without sentimental emphasis upon petit bourgeois conceptions of the ‘beautiful’. However, I said ‘first impressions’ above, because there is one aspect of Bartlett’s staging that might distress the literal-minded. It seemed interesting to me, yet arguably out of place in a production that offered nothing more of the same, rather as if the concept had wandered in from elsewhere. I speak of Bartlett’s treatment of the Countess, who emerges a sex-crazed vamp: she certainly would have captured attention in her scarlet gown even if she had not been played by Dame Josephine Barstow. Fitting or not, it was at least an idea, which was more than could be said for anything Warner mustered. The Personenregie, however, was considerably less skilled, or at least its execution was. And If Catherine the Great made her appearance, I am afraid I missed it.

The real problems, though, lay in the musical performances, and above all with Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts’s Hermann. It did not sound as though this were an off-day, more a matter of having taken on a task that lay far beyond what the voice was incapable of delivering. It would be a matter of taste rather than judgement whether the shouting or tuning proved more painful. This, I am sad to say, constituted some of the most troubling professional singing I have heard; indeed, most student or other amateur performances are executed at a much higher level. He improved slightly during the third act, though he continued to croon in a manner that might have been thought excessive for a West End musical. Some smaller roles were no less approximate and crude, though, by the same token, some proved much better. William Dazeley’s Yeletsky impressed, as did the Tomsky of Jonathan Summers. Perhaps best of all was Alexandra Sherman’s Pauline. Hers was that rare thing: a true contralto. Moreover, she could use it to properly dramatic ends, the song, ‘Podrugi milïye,’ musically shaped and genuinely moving. Orla Boylan’s Lisa had its moments, but sometimes found herself all over the place in terms both of (melo-)drama and of intonation.

The chorus had clearly been well trained by Timothy Burke, and generally acquitted itself well, most of all in the third act, when, despite the translation, choral sound came across as more plausibly Russian than elsewhere. (The translation itself veered between embarrassing couplets and the merely prosaic; in that respect, Martin Pickard’s work recalled what we heard from him for Onegin.) Barstow, as the reader may have guessed, stole the show. Though her tuning was a little awry upon her entrance, and some might have queried the preponderance of quasi-spoken, parlando style, she can still hold a stage. One longed for more, wishing that her palpable commitment had rubbed off on others.

Richard Farnes proved intermittently impressive. There was certainly dramatic drive, sensitivity too, to his conducting. Yet, whilst there were moments in which the orchestra sounded to have just the right Tchaikovsky sound – the opening of the third act, for instance – there were other passages in which the score veered awkwardly between dark, would-be Wagnerism and soft-centred Puccini. A greater body of strings would have assisted: though what was mustered played well, the lack of heft was apparent throughout. Characterful woodwind was offset by variable brass, sometimes blaring, sometimes surprisingly tentative. (Placing outside the pit, at the edge of the stage, doubtless did not help.)

It was just about worth it for the Countess, then, but Opera North’s outing to London proved for the most part a damp squib. And it is surely a little too easy to say that the problem may have lain in staging so ambitious a work. After all, it was Wozzeck, no less, that made such an impression upon me in Sheffield. The stage director of that searing, life-changing Wozzeck? Ironically, one Deborah Warner…