Janacek: The Cunning Little Vixen Blu-ray

Janacek: The Cunning Little Vixen

 (2008)

Janacek: The Cunning Little Vixen Blu-ray delivers stunning video and audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
The Cunning Little Vixen is a delightful opera that contains some of Janácek's most approachable music. This is late Janácek, so anyone who enjoys, for instance, his Sinfonietta will have no problem with the music. It is based on a Czech comic-strip and gives a rather anthropomorphic account of the lives of the forest creatures. The little vixen of the title is captured by the Forester and brought up in his home. She escapes and marries a handsome male fox and has numerous fox cubs before being shot by a poacher. The opera ends as it begins with the Forester observing a young vixen, one of her cubs, at play. The opera celebrates the endless renewal of nature and contrasts it with the sub-plot of the human-beings in the opera, the Forester, the Parson and the Schoolmaster. They get older, feebler and more disillusioned as time passes.

For more about Janacek: The Cunning Little Vixen and the Janacek: The Cunning Little Vixen Blu-ray release, see the Janacek: The Cunning Little Vixen Blu-ray Review

Janacek: The Cunning Little Vixen Blu-ray Review

A wonderfully fanciful physical production highlights this excellent performance of a lesser known piece in the operatic repertoire.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, December 23, 2009

The world of opera is filled with big composers often writing equally big pieces. Ask any given opera fan to name some famous authors in the genre and you're likely to get a familiar laundry list mentioning Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner, to name but a few. I doubt very many would include the Czech composer Leoš Janáček on their initial list, at least, and yet this often forgotten and sadly underrated composer has a handful of really interesting operatic works to his credit, including the charming fairy tale-esque The Cunning Little Vixen. While perhaps not rising to the renown of his countrymen Dvorak and Smetana, Janáček works in the same lushly melodic Romantic idiom of those two men, and his operas are well constructed, if often a bit more on the minimalist side than his Italian and German contemporaries. The Cunning Little Vixen was based on something akin to a Czechoslovokian comic strip and it maintains a decidedly childlike air which may remind some people of Ravel's Ma Mčre L'Oye in intent if not in actual musical language.

The Cunning Little Vixen's title refers not to a coquette with lustful ambitions, but rather to a female fox, who appears in the first act as a cub sung by a young girl. A forester (Jukka Rasilainen) arrives in the woods (here an incredible set of sunflowers) and captures the hapless animal, taking it home and chaining it in his yard. An orchestral interlude gives us the feeling of passing time and indeed Act II finds the vixen full grown (now sung by Elena Tsallagova), obviously unhappy at her captive state. She manages to escape, retreating to her forest lair where she quickly becomes an unwed mother (the horror!), necessitating a quick marriage to her fox beau. An evil poacher (Paul Gay) sets a trap for her children, who are nonetheless too smart to fall into it. The enraged poacher ends up shooting and killing the poor vixen, skinning it and presenting the hide to his bride as a wedding gift. The forester recognizes the pelt and returns to the place he originally found the beast, mourning her loss and ruminating on the circle of life.

The Forester is about to take a little nap, at least until the vixen shows up.

This précis sounds awfully dark, and indeed The Cunning Little Vixen has an almost Freudian subtext lurking beneath the childlike wonder of its setting and, in this production, its stage design and especially costumes. Smaller children who watch this outing will probably be more than a bit disturbed by both the captivity of the poor vixen and her eventual demise. And yet Janáček is inviting those a bit older to reflect on a number of issues, not the least of which is mortality itself. This piece was written in the twilight of Janáček's long composing career and the piece as a whole seems unusually reflective and meditative, as if the memories of halcyon days of yore are colored by a life of disappointment and trials. In fact Janáček asked for the closing music of the opera to be played at his own funeral, obviously magnifying the work's themes of life and death and cyclical rebirth.

What The Cunning Little Vixen offers to opera lovers is manifold. First of all, it's a rarely performed piece (though it has become more commonplace in recent years, perhaps aided by the charming BBC animated version of a few years ago) and very few recordings have been made of it through the years. That means it may well be a new experience for even the most jaded of audience members. Janáček's musical language here is redolent with folksong like melodies, and an innovative approach to form, with several long musical interludes coloring the canvas (something matched in this production by the nice use of filmed exterior scenes as interstitials as the interludes play). The strange dialectic between the fanciful world of animals, especially as costumed in this brilliantly imaginative production, playing out against the patently dark storyline is also quite compelling, if also quite disturbing. It brings to mind the original Grimm's Fairy Tales, in fact, works that don't shy away from the darker recesses of the human psyche even as they ostensibly paint a magical world that is supposedly accessible to the youngest of children.

Director André Engel leads a remarkably quirky production by the Opéra National de Paris, with the orchestra and chorus of the group under the able direction of Dennis Russell Davies. This is one of the most charming physical productions in recent memory, with wonderfully whimsical costumes that help imbue the proceedings with just the right amount of wonder and surprise. The opening scene's sunflower laden stage is also a wondrous sight, blended in beautifully with the opening film segment of actual sunflowers. The Cunning Little Vixen is also impeccably well sung by Rasilainen and especially Tsallagova, whose clear and bright soprano never devolves into stridency, even under some of the arduous technical demands of Janáček's leaping lines.

Too often opera lovers lament the lack of anything new. A season of yet another Tosca or Die Fledermaus or even The Ring cycle seems too passé no matter how inventive the staging and how brilliant the performances. Recent new operas like Dove's Pinocchio have helped to ameliorate this tale of woe, but the fact is there are supposedly "lesser" pieces like The Cunning Little Vixen which are still underappreciated and too infrequently performed. This is a wonderfully melodic piece with a childlike façade covering some actually quite dark themes, and it really should be seen by any lover of opera.

Janacek: The Cunning Little Vixen Blu-ray, Video Quality

 

The Cunning Little Vixen arrives from Medici Arts with an excellent 1080i/AVC encoded transfer that makes the most of the opera's extremely whimsical production design. From the opening film of gorgeous sunflowers, through the three acts of the opera, where we're greeted by a succession of really inventive costumes, The Cunning Little Vixen offers some wonderfully saturated colors and always excellent detail. The vixen's beautiful auburn costume and long hair is really superb, and many of the other costumes follow suit, with the stag's deep red clothing especially impressive. Though some of the sets are fairly minimal, the opening act, with a stage full of sunflowers, is really quite amazing and the Blu-ray provides us stellar detail, with every petal of every flower crystal clear. All of the filmed interstitials have a different, obviously more filmic (as opposed to videotaped), texture, but they are clear and as deeply saturated as the main piece.

Janacek: The Cunning Little Vixen Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 

The Cunning Little Vixen is almost a chamber opera, despite it boasting a full orchestral contingent. The DTS HD-MA 5.1 mix offers superb clarity of line, with Janáček's subtly contrapuntal writing coming through with amazing clarity. Reeds and strings are the highlight of this score, and they are reproduced here with brilliant fidelity and excellent directionality. The singing is also uniformly excellent and the 5.1 mix offers good dynamic range, with everything from Tsallagova's soaring soprano to Gay's deeply burnished bass reproduced with accuracy and a complete lack of distortion. Channel use is quite smart on this mix, as well. You'll notice, for example, The Forester clearly moving from the right to left channels early in the piece as he makes his way across the stage, and that same directionality is evident throughout the recording. The 2.0 fold down is fine and actually clearer than a lot of its operatic kin due to the very precise writing of Janáček, who never overwhelms the audience with Wagner-esque bombast.

Janacek: The Cunning Little Vixen Blu-ray, Special Features and Extras

 

A 19 minute featurette (largely in French, with English subtitles) offers background on the piece and this production in particular. The insert booklet also provides a short piece on the background as well as a plot synopsis and equally brief discussion of Janáček.

Janacek: The Cunning Little Vixen Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation

 

It's really time for Janáček to be acclaimed as the master he was. Too often he's been subsumed by the comparitively greater renown of Smetana and especially Dvorak, but the fact is he's their equal in technique if not always in ambition. The Cunning Little Vixen is a charming, albeit disturbing, piece that is sure to be enjoyed by any lover of fine music and intriguing subject matter.

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