Cunning Little Vixen review: Victorian Opera's animal attraction a perfect addition to its repertoire

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Cunning Little Vixen review: Victorian Opera's animal attraction a perfect addition to its repertoire

By Michael Shmith
Updated

OPERA
CUNNING LITTLE VIXEN ★★★★
Victorian Opera
Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
Until July 1

Not every opera is inspired by a comic strip but Leos Janacek's 1924 opera, The Cunning Little Vixen, was famously adapted from a serialised story in his local funny pages. Considering these origins, it is tempting to assume the opera is a cutesy, foxy, creepy-crawling, croaking, barking and clucking tale of Moravian bucolic life.

<I>Cunning Little Vixen</I> is as much an opera about humans as animals.

Cunning Little Vixen is as much an opera about humans as animals.Credit: Jeff Busby

This is, at heart, an intense, profound work about the cycle of nature in which creatures from the forest play just a part in the continuum of birth, ageing and death that affects us all.

In his excellent new production for Victorian Opera, director Stuart Maunder shows respect and understanding for the piece. Sure, charm and wit and a certain folksiness abound – it's always easy to chortle at a caterpillar or a frog – but this is never at the expense of the underlying, deeper themes.

Celeste Lazarenko (Vixen) leads the menagerie.

Celeste Lazarenko (Vixen) leads the menagerie.Credit: Jeff Busby

This is as much an opera about humans, and Maunder brings breadth and purpose to such characters as the Forester (nobly performed by Barry Ryan) and his wife (the fine Dimity Shepherd, who is also the wisest of owls), schoolmaster (Brenton Spiteri​, doubling as Mosquito), the poacher Harasta (Samuel Dundas), and Parson (Jeremy Kleeman, also a bristling badger).

The menagerie, led by Celeste Lazarenko's compelling, febrile and accurately sung Vixen and Antoinette Halloran's suave, if occasionally vocally strained Fox, is also distinguished by an assortment of roles performed by the chorus and children's chorus. Amid the dragonflies, bees, hens and fox cubs, I single out Ruby Ditton's heartfelt Young Vixen.

Jack Symonds, the conductor, utilises Jonathan Dove's 1998 chamber orchestration, with a 21-piece Orchestra Victoria. While one occasionally misses the lushness of a fuller ensemble, the pared-back, sparser approach pays dividends, especially with Janacek's urgent rhythms that emerge with directness in the intimacy of the Playhouse. Symonds directs a fluid and well balanced performance. The opera is sung in an adroit English translation.

Above all, it looks good. Richard Roberts' single set, with its bare trees, reflects the bareness of what we hear from the pit, but is richly illuminated with the sense of the passing seasons by Trudy Dalgleish's atmospheric lighting and Roger Kirk's suggestive rather than literal costumes.

Victorian Opera goes from strength to strength in terms of imagination and execution. Vixen is the perfect addition to its repertoire.

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