CLEVELAND — To the pantheon of opera’s unforgettable couples, from Mozart’s Figaro and Susanna to Puccini’s Tosca and Cavaradossi, I’d like to add a pair that lies a considerable distance from them: two foxes.
The title character of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen” and her lover share the stage for just a short while: They meet near the end of the second act, and the Vixen is shot dead in the third. And at Severance Hall here, where Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra performed the opera in an affecting semi-staged production on Thursday evening (the final show is on Saturday afternoon), they exist largely as cartoons on a screen.
That these animals manage, nevertheless, to tug at the heartstrings and, if I’m being honest, to bring tears to the eyes is primarily the doing of Janacek, whose radiant score treats the couple — and the cozy yet casually violent world they inhabit — with tender, smiling, unsentimental sincerity. “Novels will be written about you,” the handsome young Fox tells the Vixen in an outburst simultaneously passionate and winking. “Even operas.”
But the credit for this performance’s power extends beyond the composer. Mr. Welser-Möst and his wondrous orchestra refuse to let the music’s churning textures ever settle into sluggishness. And the soprano Martina Jankova (Vixen) and the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano (Fox) navigate Janacek’s piquant vocal lines with agility.
This is hardly the first time that this work, a reflection on nature and mortality featuring both human and animal characters, has been the vehicle for a major orchestra’s operatic ambitions. For its “Vixen” three years ago, the New York Philharmonic transformed Avery Fisher Hall into a forest glen, complete with two-story sunflowers and singers prowling about in realistic animal costumes.
Directed by Yuval Sharon, the Cleveland production takes a distinctly different approach to an opera that was, after all, inspired by a novel based on a comic strip that had been serialized in a Czech newspaper. Behind the orchestra at Severance Hall is a small stage enclosed on three sides by screens.
Projected on those screens are animations, designed by Bill Barminski and Christopher Louie of Walter Robot studios and Jason Thompson, that are sophisticated enough to shift perspective smoothly and evoke three-dimensional space but are also consciously naïve and stylized. Their playful absurdism is worlds away from the hyper-realism of a Pixar film: Earth-tone splotches indicate autumnal leaves, and the frolicking animals are drawn with delightful childlike simplicity. Scratches and blips in the background evoke the idiosyncrasies of celluloid film.
Cutouts in the screens let the cartoon animals take the heads of human singers, but only at certain moments. The juxtaposition of man and animal, reality and projection, is unstable and uncertain. While the human characters exist within an animated world, they also stand apart from it — at least before a moment of assimilation at the end that thrillingly captures the opera’s vision of nature as a cycle of death, rebirth and constant transformation.
The production bears a striking resemblance to a version of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” that originated at the Komische Oper in Berlin in 2012 and has since traveled. Riffing on the style of Expressionist film and early Disney shorts, that “Flute,” like this “Vixen,” had human singers moving in a space defined by projections on flat screens.
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That the two projects, and others like them, have emerged around the same time speaks to a curiosity — and, perhaps, anxiety — among artists regarding the fast-disintegrating boundary separating technology and us. That boundary has been an abiding interest of Mr. Sharon’s. The founder and artistic director of the Industry, an experimental opera company in Los Angeles, he recently directed a production of Christopher Cerrone’s “Invisible Cities” (a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize) in a train station there, with the audience hearing the live performance over wireless headphones.
Investigating the collision and collusion of opera and technology is fascinating, and these takes on “Flute” and “Vixen” are ingenious, but both hazard the chilliness that seems to me endemic in projection-based shows, even the cleverest. While the “Vixen” animations depict the animal characters with great charm, I kept finding myself missing the full, emoting bodies of singers who were visible only through their faces.
I don’t disagree with Mr. Sharon when he writes, in a program note, that singers’ voices and heads are their “most powerful expressive tools,” but they are not their only expressive tools. It was an intense (and likely intentional) relief when the Vixen and the Fox emerged from behind the screens during their love duet. While the pleasure of that reprieve may have been possible only because those bodies were otherwise assiduously hidden, I’m not sure the effect was worth a certain detached quality elsewhere.
But the animations were consistently responsive to the warmly propulsive music. It is a characteristic, irresistible Janacek move to break into a passage of swirling anxiety with a lush, lyrical orchestral surge, and Mr. Sharon and his collaborators echo these moments in sudden pullbacks of perspective.
They provide a consistently apt visual complement to a musical performance of impeccable quality and wide textural range, from the rustle of strings tapped with the wood of bows at the beginning to the horn fanfares that open the final scene with unassuming flawlessness. Mr. Welser-Möst treats the score — as he did Strauss’s “Salome” with this orchestra in 2012 — with a lithe flexibility that gives climaxes a fearsomely contrasting grandeur and weight.
The orchestra’s chorus and children’s chorus both performed with authority. The bass-baritone Alan Held sang with rich tone and acute emotion as the Forester, who traps the Vixen and years later mourns her. Among the animals, the sensuous mezzo-soprano Julie Boulianne and the resonant bass-baritone Dashon Burton were particularly excellent.
But it is the opera’s brief, poignant love story, so sensitively performed here, that will stay with me. “How many children have we had, old woman?” the aging Fox asks the Vixen in the final act. By that point, we have lived a lifetime with these characters in just a few minutes.
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