The New York City Opera continues its year-long season with a varied
combination of revivals of past productions and eight new stagings
under the artistic direction of Paul Kellogg, now in his second year
as General and Artistic Director. One revival and one new production
in this first half of the season were of particular
interest: the
revival of LeoÅ¡ JanáÄ?ek’s
The Cunning Little Vixen, sung in English with set and costumes
created from designs by Maurice Sendak, and a new version (in
co-production with the Glimmerglass Opera) of Carlisle Floyd’s 1970
setting of John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella Of Mice and Men.

This company can always be counted on for
invigorating the
repertory. It is not that they ignore a Butterfly or a
Rigoletto—such warhorses are very much on the boards this
season—but the
main thrust of the operatic programming ventures into two other
areas—non-canonic opera and relatively neglected American
works. The Cunning Little Vixen (1924), first produced by
this house in 1981, revived in 1983 and 1990 and now again this
year, brings us to the paradox of JanáÄ?ek’s achievement.
Here is a
composer who died in 1928 but whose works still offer a
challenge
to audiences because of
their feisty idiosyncrasy in subject matter, roughly hewn orchestral
textures, and eccentric vocal speech rhythms (when heard in the
original Czech, needless to say). Very much a man of his time, and
all the more so the older he got, JanáÄ?ek was an