Mark Morris/Renard, Mostly Mozart Festival, New York

Mark Morris/Renard, Mostly Mozart Festival, New York

Apollinaire Scherr for Financial Times

Of course Stravinsky’s burlesque Renard (Fox) would appeal to Mark Morris. The jaunty chamber opera fashioned from Russian folklore takes up such favourite Morris subjects as venality, hypocrisy and horniness. And the music’s bumptiousness lends itself to another Morris lodestar, the Saturday morning cartoon. In fact, cartoons and unbowdlerised folktales, burlesqued or not, share similar scoundrels, schemers and dunderheads, got up in animal guise. Yet in its New York premiere, Renard fell short of its juicy potential. (Mostly Mozart continues until Saturday; meanwhile, the Morris troupe performs at Jacob’s Pillow.)