This was a really up-lifting and fine performance which engaged everyone and was wonderfully heart-warming. I have heard this work twice before in live performance – a very good Glyndebourne production, which maybe was a bit too perfect in retrospect, but very beautiful to look at (and it may be that I had had too much Glyndebourne-related champagne to focus sufficiently on the memory of what it was like), and a performance a couple of years ago – see earlier in this blog – in concert with the LSO, Simon Rattle and the estimable Lucy Crowe as the Vixen and Gerald Finlay as the Forester , which was lovely, but not the same as a theatre show.
This production, done to a very tight design budget, was extremely effective. A recycling bin – linking of course with urban foxes – stood in for the vixen’s lair, the bar of the pub and several other places. Children flying kites on long poles represented all the insects of the forest, and there were some quite clever masks for some of the creatures – the dog, the owl, the badger – while not giving the vixen and dog fox a mask. The ending, where the Forester gazes into the forest and sees something of the divine in all the activity around him, was marvellously done, with very effective coloured lighting and a great blaze of brightness on the final note, together with dramatic use of the Holland Park House door, which was flung open to reveal a golden Vixen. There were some great sunflowers accompanying the Vixen’s marriage! Very good use was made of the opera ‘house’ space – children, actors came in at different times from all of the 6 or so ways into the auditorium available to them, and the singers were able to use the space in front of the orchestra as well as behind them.
There needs to be a real company feel to any performance of this work – there are a lot of children playing frogs, vixen cubs, insects etc, a cast of smaller characters, a chorus, and three singers with a big part – the Vixen, the Forester and the Dog Fox. That sense of happy company interaction, of people really enjoying themselves as part of a temporary community, came across very effectively. Of the three big parts, Jennifer France was outstanding as the Vixen – a powerfully sung, energetic even charismatic performance. Julia Sporsén was an excellent Fox. Grant Doyle was not the most poetic Forester (Thomas Allen on the old Rattle recording and Gerald Finlay on the new one make much more poetic impact with the words and the phrasing they give them) but was perfectly adequate while the stand-in Poacher of Ashley Riches got a big cheer from the audience. The work was sung in English but very little of it was audible, I assume because of the inevitably strange Holland Park acoustics – so thank goodness for surtitles
Curiously the orchestra sounded more together, louder and more expressive than the previous evening. Under Jessica Cottis, I thought they played really well, and the conductor seemed to have real expressive power in her gestures and beat that was getting across to the orchestra and positively energising them. The reduced orchestra was really not a problem, except perhaps in that final blaze of glory, which does need a full-bodied string sound (which a total of 9 strings isn’t going to achieve)
This is a strange work in many ways and one that really invites you to more listening – I shall look forward to what I hope will be the postponed ENO production happening in Feb/March 2022
John's musical journey 