New York Philharmonic hits another winner with 'Cunning Little Vixen'

On Wednesday, just a little more than a year after their surprise-hit staging of Gyorgy Ligeti’s neglected “Le Grande Macabre,” conductor Alan Gilbert and director Doug Fitch presented Leos Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.”

Once again, it was a wide-open shot. Too short and intimate for a night at a grand opera house yet too thickly orchestrated for chamber companies, the seemingly childlike — although surreally grave — “Vixen” remains a rarity, even while the Czech master’s other operas have seen productions in Washington (“Jenufa,” in 2007) and New York (“From the House of the Dead,” in 2009, with “The Makropulos Case” to come next year).

Judged by its premiere, the Philharmonic’s second staged opera can be counted as another victory, although its creators’ overall conception is not as lights-out as it was in “Macabre.” After all, getting a handle on the elusive tone of “Vixen” — a fable about all-too-mortal humans and anthropomorphized woodland creatures — has proved difficult for other Janacek admirers. Kafka literary executor Max Brod, who translated Janacek’s operas into German, lobbied for a streamlined story, even suggesting that an offstage avatar of male desire actually appear in the drama. But Janacek stuck to his abstractions, creating a sometimes playful but unmistakably old-man-in-winter ode to the cycle of life.

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