Then only a couple of weeks later, Rose was back with his Boston Modern Orchestra Project in an utterly delightful, imaginatively-costumed concert version of Tobias Picker’s “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” perhaps a little too grown-up for some of the many youngsters in the audience, but delicious for the grown-ups themselves, full of wittily suggestive verbal and musical jokes.
The terrific cast included John Brancy and Krista River as Mr. and Mrs. Fox; Elizabeth Futral as the erotically quivering Miss Hedgehog and Theo Lebow as her inamorato Mr. Porcupine; phenomenal Russian countertenor Andrey Nemzer as the hilariously unstoppable Agnes the Digger; and Andrew Craig Brown, Edwin Vega and Gabriel Preisser as the villainous farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean. But maybe best of all were the Boston Children’s Chorus as the Chorus of Trees, who had the most haunting music in the opera. Rose and the BMOP Orchestra were at the top of their form.