Classical
Fox fatale
by Rod Biss
Nimby Opera goes from strength to strength with __The Cunning Little Vixen.__
Nimby Opera is a young, vital company that deserves to survive. It was established in 2006 by operatic idealists John Parker and Barbara Paterson, with an attendant group of young singers keen to work for them. Parker says its goal is “to concentrate on small-scale 20th-century works not yet performed here – there’s certainly a market for them”.
Its first production, Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, proved that last point. The Wellington audiences gave Nimby box-office results that exceeded targets. “Polished and arresting,” said the Dominion Post; a production that would “grace any festival”, according to NZ Opera News.
Thus encouraged, Nimby became even more adventurous and last year put on New Zealand composer Lyell Cresswell’s Good Angel, Bad Angel. Three Wellington performances were followed by a short tour to Palmerston North and Auckland, where the late-night show was packed out. “The company has come up with a workable alternative to big-budget opera in the grand style,” said the New Zealand Herald.
This year’s production, Leoš Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, is an opera like no other. It started life as an illustrated story – a series of virtual comic strips – that ran almost daily in Janáček’s local newspaper in Brno in 1920. The strips looked with wry insight and earthy humour at the lives of the forest animals and the country folk who lived alongside them. The foxes, badgers, birds, frogs and insects, together with the forester, schoolteacher, parson and innkeeper, as well as their wives and would-be girlfriends, seemed like operatic material to Janáček, who mulled over his ideas for a year before writing a note.
“I played with the vixen as if she was tame,” he said. “It’s strange how the rusty red of her fur continually blazed in my eyes.”
Within a couple of years, it had turned, with Janáček’s libretto, into a beguiling, gloriously amoral masterpiece that is true to animals and humans without a moment’s sentimentality.
A fox cub is captured and taken home to be a pet for the forester’s children. She’s far brighter than the humans, kills the forester’s chickens, escapes, finds a mate, has her own cubs but is eventually killed herself. The bumbling humans of the story can only exist with the aid of the tavern’s alcohol. Into this plot, Janáček weaves all his forward-leaning beliefs about politics, unionism, ecology and even feminism.
‘The vixen is ruthless about getting exactly what she wants; she’s a genuinely radical female, very much in control, making a living for herself, finding her own food, finding her own house,” says Parker.
“But it’s not a high literary source – the jokes are bawdy, the men sit around drinking and complaining about their wives. It has a broad appeal which brings a smile to your face.”
After the vixen is killed, Janáček moves quickly forward, and in the final scene the forester dreams of the vixen. “He realises the beauty and wonder of life and what he might have lost by the killing of the vixen whom he was semi in love with.”
The Cunning Little Vixen is being directed for Nimby by Jacqueline Coats, who was responsible for a very successful Cosi Fan Tutte for Opera Otago last year. The conductor will be Justus Rozemond, who has also re-scored the original orchestration for five musicians.
Kate Lineham will sing the vixen, -Matthew Landreth the forester and Paterson the fox. The -animated backdrops, as well as costumes, have been created by cartoonist Tsai Lim.
At present, Vixen will be seen in Wellington only. However, Nimby is doing a 15-minute presentation at PANNZ (Performing Arts Network of New Zealand) with the hope that a tour of smaller venues can be arranged. Non-Wellingtonians had better lobby their local theatre to convince management they need Vixen in their town. If you know what “Nimby” stands for, you’ll understand why I want it renamed Imby.
