This year’s winner of the Opernwelt magazine’s ‘Opera House of the Year’ award, Oper Frankfurt, launched a new production of Leoš Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen as its 10th premiere of the 2015/2016 season. Owing to the last century’s environmental disasters no longer being able to perceive the forrest as the ‘wonderfully beautiful’ place as sung by the Forester in the last act, the production’s director Ute M. Engelhardt decided to set the story into a big a city where the Vixen portrayed as a young woman wanders aimlessly surrounded by its concrete wasteland.
Formed almost exclusively by the members of the opera house’s ensemble, the cast includes Louise Alder and Elizabeth Reiter alternating in the role of Vixen, Jenny Carlstedt (The Fox), Joanna Krasuska-Motulewicz (Foresters’s wife, Owl), Beau Gibson (Schoolmaster) and, as guest, the British baritone Simon Neal (Forester). The opera is conducted by Johannes Debus, music director of Canadian Opera Company in Toronto who is in December making his debut at MET with Strauss’s Salome. The Cunning Little Vixen received its premiere on 24 April 2016, almost 40 years since its last appearance on the Oper Frankfurt’s stage. Sung in Czech, the production will be held eight times in total during this season.
24 April 2016, Oper Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
repeat performances: April 30, May 7, 15, 22, 25 and 26, June 12 2016
Leoš Janáček: The Cunning Little Vixen (1924)
Director: Ute M. Engelhardt, conductor: Johannes Debus