The Rake's Progress, Opéra national de Paris, 30 November 2024

Palais Garnier

Tom Rakewell – Ben Bliss
Nick Shadow – Iain Paterson
Trulove – Clive Bayley
Anne Trulove – Golda Schultz
Mother Goose – Justina Gringytė
Baba the Turk – Jamie Barton
Sellem – Rupert Charlesworth
Keeper of the Madhouse – Vartan Gabrielian
Voices from the Crowd – Ayumi Ikehata, Frédéric Guieu
Solo Voice – Laurent Laberdesque

Director, lighting – Olivier Py
Revival director – Joséphine Kirch
Designs – Pierre-André Weitz
Lighting collaboration – Bertrand Killy

Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus director: Ching-Lien Wu) 

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris

Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

Images: Guergana Damaniova / OnP

The Rake’s Progress seems, as Stravinsky admitted, almost ‘to have been to have been created for journalistic debates concerning: a) the historical validity of the approach; and, b) the question whether I am guilty of imitation and pastiche.’ Or so, once, it did—to me, at least, and I think to many others too. I no longer bother about such questions; I am not sure anyone else does either. That does not mean it has ceased to pose us questions. Far from it. Their nature, though, has changed and they tend to focus, quite rightly, on the musical drama rather than ‘legitimacy’ or even timeliness. If in some yet far from all ways, it marked the end of a line, or at least a high watermark, for the neoclassical Stravinsky, with distance, it seems far from the end of a musical line. More to the point, in its very artificiality and neither entirely like nor unlike Così fan tutte – their orchestras, as Stravinsky noted, similar in size – it seems increasingly to move audiences and indeed performers in ways all too readily missed by earlier generations. 

Entirely by coincidence, I had spoken a little about The Rake’s Progress in a session of my undergraduate class on Mozart’s operas earlier in the week, taking it and Der Rosenkavalier as two highly contrasted twentieth-century operas consciously written in Mozart’s wake. It was probably that that had lodged a further Stravinskian utterance in my mind: ‘If the Rake contains imitations, however – of Mozart, as has been said,’ Stravinsky owned, ‘I will gladly allow the charge (given the breadth of the Aristotelian word), if I may thereby release people from the argument and bring them to the music.’ That ‘if’, however is the point; it is actually rarely Mozart who comes to my mind, the coincidences being too obvious, whether in Stravinsky or in Auden (Da Ponte too, of course). If anything, that was even less so here, in a performance led by Susanna Mälkki which felt more remote both from such ‘debates’ and indeed from any performing tradition than another I can recall. There were things I missed:, the polemical Stravinsky, the ultra-referential Stravinsky, much of the archness and the bite, to which somewhat soft-centred playing from the Paris Opéra orchestra contributed (presumably at the conductor’s request). 

Other correspondences nonetheless arose: that of the balletic Stravinsky, not so much the ‘great’ scores of the early century as some closer in time to the Rake: the Scènes de ballet in particular, but also, at a somewhat greater distance, Jeu de cartes and even the Tchaikovskian Fairy’s Kiss. Such neoclassicism makes sense, of course, though it also draws into question the usefulness of the term, since it refers to and indeed means such very different things in different contexts and at different times, all the more so when unmistakeable ostinato kinship with Oedipus Rex (beyond that, also to Poulenc) reared its head. These may well have been as much my thoughts as anything intended; it is difficult to say. But what I did sense, quite strongly, was a more overt sense of sadness – partly tempi, which often felt slow – and even tragedy. It was as if the work, consciously or otherwise, were being assimilated into a more ‘operatic’, even Italianate, tradition such as Stravinsky himself spoke of, that of Verdi, but also at times that of Berg, the latter perhaps ironically, given the contrast Stravinsky himself drew with that tradition, eschewing ‘forms symbolically expressive of the dramatic content (as in the Daedalian examples of Alban Berg)’ in favour of number opera. But then should we ever take Stravinsky at his word, or at least at face value? 

That musical trajectory seemed to proceed broadly in tandem with Olivier Py’s production, here on the first night of its revival. Haunted by death, in the ‘person’ of Tom’s uncle’s skeleton, and also, at the front of the stage, by the memento mori of a skull and hourglass, it too seemed to say or accept that this was less an opera about opera than it was simply an opera. Anne bore Tom’s child, who had advanced a few years by the final scene. Again, there was loss, at least for me, not least in any sense of London, a major character not only in Hogarth but surely at least in Auden too. Perhaps, though, I feel that more keenly as a Londoner, and one should not be restrictive about such things. There was not so much either, though, of city life, even more generically. The production felt not so much abstracted as moving psychology to the foreground, almost to the exclusion of anything else. On its own terms, all was stylishly presented, Pierre-André Weitz’s designs showing a keen eye for colour schemes and correspondences. Dance, both in character and more abstract-interpretative, played a role, heightening that sense of kinship with the composer’s ballets. 

The cast was strong throughout, with a lovely central pair in Ben Bliss’s Tom and Golda Schultz’s Anne. Bliss’s performance engaged one’s sympathies through honeyed tone and acting alike. Schultz presented a stronger, more ‘present’ character than is often the case, and was all the better for it. Iain Paterson’s Nick Shadow was quite without caricature, a more rounded character in the conventional sense, in keeping with broader parameters of performance and production. Love her or hate her, you cannot ignore Baba the Turk, and that was very much the knowing showbiz strategy of Jamie Barton’s assumption of the role. I especially enjoyed Rupert Charlesworth’s auctioneer Sellem, perhaps the most vocally acted of all performances, manner and mannerism conveying so much with relatively little: highly Stravinskian, one might say. Other roles were all well taken, with a keen sense of theatre, chorus members and dancers included. If there were times when I felt the chorus, like the orchestra, lacked Stravinskian bite, that was doubtless in part a consequence of Mälkki’s interpretative stance than performance as such.   

Where, then, does that leave us? Going round in further circles? To an extent, yes; does it not always with this work? Yet the repertoire assimilationism did bring something new, surely to be welcomed, whatever my personal likes or dislikes. Once again, I was led to reflect on how much we, or at least I, might be steered by Stravinsky’s CBS recording, technically flawed yet in possession of qualities it is difficult not to think near-definitive. It is surely a sign of maturity that, however much that may be imprinted on some of our memories, the work and our reactions to it have multiple lives beyond any of its creators. I never sympathised with, say, Boulez’s condemnation to Cage: ‘Have you heard Rake’s Progress? What ugliness!’ though I understood why he might have thought so and perhaps in part wanted to agree. Right now, though, I am grateful to have gone beyond that, as surely we all should have, seventy years on. Debates change yet persist.

The Rake's Progress, Royal Academy of Music, 24 November 2022

Susie Sainsbury Theatre

Tom Rakewell – Ryan Vaughan Davies
Anne Trulove – Cassandra Wright
Nick Shadow – Jacob Phillips
Father Trulove – Hovhannes Karapetyan
Sellem – Samuel Kibble
Baba the Turk – Rebecca Hart
Mother Goose – Georgia Mae Ellis
Keeper of the Madhouse – Duncan Stenhouse.

Frederic Wake-Walker (director)
Anna Jones (designs)
Charlotte Burton (lighting)
Ergo Phizmiz (collage, animation, AI image generation and illustration)
Lottie Bywater (illustration and animation)

Chorus
Royal Academy Sinfonia
Trevor Pinnock (conductor)

Blessed by varied approaches to its staging and performance, The Rake’s Progress seems to remain eternally itself (whatever that might mean, as a sometime Prince of Wales might have put it). Not unlike Stravinsky’s evergreen score, the cleverer and in many respects the more involving the more one knows it, everything may seem to come from somewhere else, and in a sense it does; but equally, in another sense, it does not. It makes for great theatre, almost no matter what, and Royal Academy Opera certainly achieved that, as indeed it did when I reviewed an earlier production here by John Ramster, seven years ago. 

This new incarnation, directed by Frederic Wake-Walker, relies heavily on eye-catching animation (Ergo Phizmiz) and images of present-day London from Downing Street to City towers to (presumably former) local authority buildings in their shadow. In one sense (yes, Janus-faced again), it was not always clear to me what it might all add up to. Another Rake placing London at its very heart, Simon McBurney’s as seen in Aix, for me penetrated deeper. For instance, with cardboard boxes—a very large one being Baba the Turk’s sedan chair—arriving alongside partygoers on Downing Street, I assumed we might have some sort of insight into more notorious parties still; yet instead, we headed somewhere else. The party had moved on—as, of course, so many Covid partygoers urged us to. Perhaps indeed that was the point, for earlier eighteenth-century costumes and Arcadia notwithstanding, this was a Rake for the age of Instagram, chorus members eager to snap pictures of Baba once she had emerged.

The odd thing was that Baba simply seemed to be a celebrity, with no evident reason for notoriety and certainly no beard: a sort of cross between Su Pollard and Lady Gaga. Again, perhaps that was the point. There were plenty of visual jokes, which kept a lively audience amused. And who is to say, after all, that one does not miss the point if one does not remain on the surface level? With boxes strewn across scenes, signs of transitory lives, and bubble wrap emerging ingeniously from them, that certainly did seem to be part, at least, of the point. The melancholy work of Bedlam inmates at the end, refashioning material that once had made up their party clothes, was an excellent touch. 

Stravinsky points both ways, of course; so too, arguably, does Auden. Trevor Pinnock’s conducted a lively and generous account of the score, the Royal Academy Sinfonia sharp, pointed, yet far from inexpressive. Occasionally I missed greater numbers in the pit, but chamber forces had virtues of their own, not least in solo work, where reference to eighteenth-century music(s) in particular truly hit home. The orchestra contributed greatly to the gaiety of the occasion, but also to its poignancy, and not only in the final act. Lost moments of Cosi fan tutte, suspended in musical animation, made their fleeting point almost as strongly as the fatal games of the graveyard scene (for which special mention should go to the excellent harpsichordist Alexsander Ribeiro de Lara). The chorus, very much a collection of soloists, in gesture and musical line, who could yet come together as more than the sum of their parts, was not the least shining light of the evening’s entertainment. 

Nor too were the young soloists, many of them doubtless heading towards careers in whatever remains of the opera business after our Downing Street masters and ‘Arts Council England’ have had their say. Like Stravinsky—Auden too—they may have to emigrate. Good luck to them, if so, if Brexit-Insel continues to treat them as seems likely. Ryan Vaughan Davies was a memorable Tom Rakewell, neglecting neither implied poignancy of situation nor irresistible allure of the moment. Whether one should sympathise or not is perhaps a moot point; it would, however, have been difficult to fail to do so.

Likewise, from other angles, the rest of the cast—who might, after all, on paper seem difficult to like, let alone to love. Cassandra Wright’s Anne combined cleanness and beauty of Mozartian line with the fleshed-out character of his heroines: a combination far from always achieved. Jacob Phillips’s dark and dangerous Nick Shadow involved us, like it or not. Hovhannes Karapetyan’s dark-voiced, seemingly generous-of-heart Father Trulove, Georgia Mae Ellis’s fun-loving yet formidable Mother Goose, and Rebecca Hart’s capricious yet, at the last, deeply human Baba the Turk all added novelty to their roles without departing unduly from what we (fancied we) already knew. Samuel Kibble’s lively Sellem and Duncan Stenhouse’s compassionate Keeper of the Madhouse rounded off a cast with no weak links and excellent interaction. Perhaps, indeed, that was the point.

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence (1) - The Rake's Progress, 11 July 2017

Théâtre de l’Archevêché

Actors, Chorus, Mother Goose (Hilary Summers), Tom Rakewell (Paul Appleby), Nick Shadow (Kyle Ketelsen)
Images: © Patrick Berger / artcompress

Ann Trulove – Julia Bullock

Tom Rakewell – Paul Appleby

Nick Shadow – Kyle Ketelsen

Nick Shadow 2, The Keeper of the Asylum – Evan Hughes

Trulove – David Pittsinger

Mother Goose – Hilary Summers

Baba the Turk – Andrew Watts

Sellem – Alan Oke

Actors – Antony Antunes, Kirsty Arnold, Nichole Bird, Karl Fagerlund Brekke, Andrew Gardiner, Chihiro Kawasaki, Maxime Nourissat, Jami Reid-Quarrell, Gabriella Schmidt, Clemmie Sveaas

Simon McBurney (director)

Gerard McBurney (dramaturgy)

Michael Levine (designs)

Christina Cunningham (costumes)

Paul Anderson (lighting)

Will Duke (video)

Leah Hausman (choreography, design assistance)

English Voices (chorus master: Tim Brown)

Orchestre de Paris

Eivind Gullberg Jensen (conductor)

Auction guests, Baba the Turk (Andrew Watts) and Tom 

I thought it was longer than it had been since my most recent Rake’s Progress. When I checked, I discovered that had only been a couple of years or so ago, at the Royal Academy: and very good it was too. Nevertheless, this new Aix production from Simon McBurney proves mightily refreshing. It has something in common with the RAM staging (John Ramster) in that it concentrated on the opera as an opera, rather than the debates surrounding it – although those can surely never be far away from most of our experience, whatever Stravinsky, with typical disingenuousness, might have suggested. But the emphasis and the illumination are different, which is surely just as it should be.

London stands at the heart of this Rake. Not, thank God, in a particularist sort of way: that would be especially absurd for a staging in Provence. This is not only the city of Hogarth, but also the city that was, for all its flaws, indeed in many ways on account of them, until recently the greatest in the world. It destroyed itself in part, of course; ‘its’ greed, both in the eighteenth century and under neoliberalism, rightly provokes revulsion, none greater than that of those who live or have lived there and are not members of the ‘banking community’ and other such delightful trades. But for those of us estranged from our country at the moment, Theresa May’s ‘citizens of nowhere’, we know who really did it. We are also able to recognise our city with all the delicious agony of an exile, internal or external, in what we see before us, without collapse into the merely didactic. For the great, indeed diabolical con trick that is capitalism, whether neoliberal or in an early mutation, is in large part the parable here; it always was, whatever Stravinsky or even Auden might have told us. (Repeat after me. Intention is not everything; sometimes it is very little at all.) When Tom goes to London, he goes to the City; he goes to one of those plush, joyless, ‘pleasurable’ towers, from which one may see other towers. He has well-dressed, superficially attractive – very attractive – people fawn over him, change his clothes, transform him into one of them. He is – and this would hit home as strongly as I have ever known it do – ‘weak’, as Ann tells us. Christina Cunningham’s costumes are a profoundly important – and knowingly shallow – contributor to the drama; they make us envious, even complicit, wishing or at least in danger of wishing we were part of the tragedy we know this pleasure garden to be.

Nick, Tom, and images of Baba

When Mother Goose’s establishment comes into view, the emphasis shifts to eroticism that is both blatant and subtle. Again, most of us probably want it, although we know we should not. A subtle orgy might seem a contradiction in terms, at least to those of us on the outside of this world, but Leah Hausman’s choreography really does its work here. Far more is suggested than actually depicted; our minds, our imaginations are made to do the dirty work. Pornography, the pornography of late capitalism, is thus dramatised and accused. I could not help but think of Antonio Negri’s Constitution of Time. In all the pleasure, the beauty of the young bodies, there is of course neutralisation too. Everything becomes the same; it does not matter whom one chooses, whom one adds to one’s iPhone collection. And so, after Tom has taken his pictures – displayed to the world, as they would be, although in this case on the walls of the set – of his final nubile companion of the evening, Nick Shadow, the capitalist Devil himself, shows him pictures of Baba the Turk. The rest you know – save for the twist here that Baba is now played by a counter-tenor. Her whole life is performance, an act, of course, and this takes its place in her line of publicity strategies. There is no especial jolt to our – or at least to my – understanding; that, I suspect, is part of the point. The auction is full of typical metropolitan ‘style’, that of the empty, expensive sort in which the drama has been mired all along: Mayfair, not Whitechapel.

On the other side, however, Ann seems, and I think probably is, more present than ever. She sometimes, earlier on, walks past. Tom appears to see her, but does he? And would what that even mean if he did? She is good, a symbol of goodness, but she is not just that; I felt her more as a character than I can remember doing so before. That is partly a matter of Julia Bullock’s tremendous performance, touchingly pure, and with every word readily audible (far from always the case in this role). But it is partly McBurney’s conception too. She is, perhaps, a social critic too, no mere inegénue. There is indeed, as McBurney suggests in a brief programme interview, ‘dans une certaine mesure une figure révolutionnaire’ to be perceived there too. Baba knows that, it seems. She has her own roles to play, but she is convinced by Ann, and actually sends her on her way to attempt, however vainly, redemption.

Ann Trulove (Julia Bullock) with auction guests behind

Before that, moreover, Ann walks through a typical Tube subway, cleverly conjured up with design technology: a bit of that South Kensington pedestrian tunnel to it, actually, although more ‘desolate’, ‘poorer’, to the non-London, or con-comprehending, eye. That actually means more alive, of course; the homeless people and the busker – playing solo trumpet, in a nice touch – are, for us Londoners, for us human beings, the real story, the real tragedy. And in a final, potentially Foucouldian twist, the man running the show in Bedlam is Nick Shadow’s shadow. Madness has of course always been a way to deal with criticism. Had Tom perhaps an inkling of what was going on; or might, at the very least, Ann have helped him enlighten him had he not fallen ‘mad’? The voices in his head are the voices we hear all around us: ‘unelectable’, ‘sensible’, ‘moderate’, and so forth? They are the voices that will do all they can to prevent us make London, not what it was, but what it should have been, could have been, all along – and in many ways still is.

I almost – almost – believed, then, in the ‘love story’ that comes almost sentimentally to the foreground of work and production alike. Bullock played her part in that, of course. So did Paul Appleby’s lovable, lovably weak Tom: the sort of character one knows one should distrust, and yet desperately wishes to do otherwise. He never seemed quite the author of his own actions; which amongst us is, whilst Nick is at play? More than that, though, his sappy tenor proved just as sympathetic and manipulative as Bullock’s crystal-clear soprano. Kyle Ketelsen’s Nick was every bit as persuasive as he should be – and more so. He was reassuringly ‘normal’, ‘as things are’, until one really looked and listened: just like capital itself, and with all the dangerous, often surprisingly understated, attraction it exerts. Evan Hughes proved an excellent shadow to the shadow: the same, and yet different. A more real ‘normality’ was offered by David Pittsinger’s splendidly sane Trulove; or is Trulove just a better actor, the voice of old-school conservatism? Hilary Summers made for a fantastic Mother Goose: ruler of her own world, not least vocally, and with a splendidly naughty sense of genuine fun. Is she not a ‘revolutionary’ in her way, too? Or are we just meant to think so? Andrew Watts made much of Baba’s staginess; how could he not? But there was definitely a human heart beating strongly there; the appeal to her fans is far from entirely to be dismissed. Alan Oke’s Sellem imparted a fine sense of slightly camp insidiousness: all the better to sell Tom’s goods with. 

The graveyard scene

There was a ruthless dryness to much, not all, of Eivind Gullberg Jensen’s conducting which was not only echt neo-classical Stravinsky, but very much of the dramatic idea. The orchestra, both unlike and not unlike Wagner, was telling us something. A delight in contrivance, moreover, fused perfectly with the score’s well-nigh miraculous forging of continuity out of what ‘should’ merely stop and start. Stravinsky’s cellular method here is, in many ways, not so very different either from his late serial masterpieces or, dare I suggest it, The Rite of Spring. The miracle is his – and, in a way, that of capital too. If the Orchestre de Paris had its soloistic moments and was for the most part commendably sharp of rhythm. If there was certainly nothing wrong with its performance, though, there was perhaps a slight lack of presence, even of commitment, that slightly detracted from the musico-dramatic whole. Maybe it was as much an acoustical matter as anything else: outdoor performances, notoriously, take a good deal of getting used to. There was certainly no such fault to be found with the singers of English Voices, all of whom played their individually directed performances to a tee. They, like the rest of us, were both enthralled and ultimately destroyed by the game afoot.

The Rake's Progress, Royal Academy of Music, 16 March 2015

Sir Jack Lyons Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

Tom Rakewell – Bradley Smith

Anne Trulove – Rhiannon Llewellyn
Nick Shadow – Božidar Smiljanić
Baba the Turk – Claire Barnett-Jones
Sellem – Gwilym Bowen
Trulove – Lancelot Nomura
Mother Goose – Katherine Aitken
Keeper of the Madhouse – Ed Ballard 

John Ramster (director)

Adrian Linford (designs)
Victoria Newlyn (choreography)
Jake Wiltshire (lighting)

Royal Academy Opera Chorus
Royal Academy Sinfonia
Jane Glover (conductor)

The apogee of neo-Classicism, an opera surely intended to incite debate upon debate about it and its form, whatever Stravinsky’s typically disingenuous, eye-twinkling denials, The Rake’s Progress is, unless one is Pierre Boulez, very difficult not to admire, almost as difficult not in some sense to disapprove of or at least to suspect, perhaps almost as difficult to love. I think this Royal Academy staging might just have proved me wrong on the final point.

For what struck me about John Ramster’s production and, of course, the performances onstage it inspired, was that they treated this first and foremost as an opera. They  certainly were neither deaf nor blind to the debates – ‘The Rake’s Progress seemed to have been created for journalistic debates concerning: a) the historical validity of the approach; and, b) the question whether I am guilty of imitation and pastiche. If the Rake contains imitations, however – of Mozart, as has been said – I will gladly allow the charge (given the breadth of the Aristotelian word), if I may thereby release people from the argument and bring them to the music.’ (Stravinsky) – but they did not become ensnared by them. Still less did they mistake them for questions of æsthetic quality. Ramster’s production frames the work well, the first scene indicating a mid-twentieth-century filming of an eighteenth-century drama, and there are occasional reminders, not least the appearance in various guises of indications as to how many days Tom Rakewell will have left before his reckoning with Nick Shadow. But for the most part, that framing falls away, and a somewhat yet not excessively stylised set of designs (all handsomely done by Adrian Linford) is not mistaken for human hearts beating beneath the framing and the ‘debates’.

For that, the cast, well prepared by Jane Glover, naturally deserves the lion’s share of the credit. Bradley Smith presented a weak, human, yet impossible-not-to-like Tom: just as he should be. His sappy tenor proved appealing throughout, but moving too, especially towards the end: all very much in character. Rhiannon Llewellyn’s Anne combined grace and beauty to a properly euphonious degree; her first act aria was very fine indeed. Božidar Smiljanić’s Nick stole the show on a number of occasions: protean, dark, and humorous. One could hardly have asked for more. Claire Barnett-Jones revealed a richly expressive voice as well as a finely-judged sense of humour as Baba. As Sellem, Gwilym Bowen offered a very different sense of humour, utterly captivating, never outstaying its welcome, and likewise never at the expense of excellent musical values, line and attention to the words exemplary. Indeed, there was hardly a moment in the entire performance on which one could not readily discern Auden’s libretto. Lancelot Nomura’s deep-voiced Trulove, Katherine Aitken’s haughtily naughty Mother Goose, and Ed Ballard’s Keeper of the Madhouse rounded off, but certainly did not merely round off, an excellent cast.

Choral singing was mightily impressive, as was Ramster’s direction of the chorus. After a slightly, though only slightly, shaky start, in which Glover’s conducting lacked the bite one (not unreasonably) expects, the orchestra passed with flying colours too. Again, a heart was revealed, without any loss to the intellectual, time-travelling revels, in which now more than ever one can understand why Stravinsky would make his next (apparent) about turn. Schoenberg est mort, or rather he may, to a post-war generation, have seemed to be; serialism, however, was already in Stravinsky’s personal way under preparation. Richard Leach's harpsichord playing, not least in that extraordinary graveyard solo, was dazzling.

I am not yet entirely won over by Henze’s typically anti-Boulezian – and not just anti-him – words from an interview in 1967:

Soon the ‘clusters’, the serial recitatives and the ‘happenings’ will have exhausted themselves, and the young composer will look around in vain in this wasteland for something to nourish his hungry soul. I believe, in contrast to Boulez for whom the neo-Classical Stravinsky is 'very weak' (there they go, forty years of musical history, brushed aside in a couple of words!), that in the next few years he will be seen properly for the first time, and understood in all his greatness and significance. The history of music knows plenty of examples where a reorientation has been necessary. This will be the case in the near future too.

In any case, that debate is surely dead and buried; no one thinks about ‘Darmstadt’ like that any more, nr indeed even speaks of ‘Darmstadt’ as such a thing-in-itself; I doubt, moreover, that anyone thinks about Henze and Stravinsky quite in Boulez-of-1960s vein either. For me, neo-Classical Stravinsky’s achievements nevertheless remain very mixed; Orpheus, for instance, I dislike as much as ever, though ‘dislike’ is not to be confused with ‘denigrate’. Perhaps, though, I was edged a little closer to Henze on this occasion. If so, it was by virtue of this fine staging and performance.

 

The Rake's Progress, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 29 August 2010

Glyndebourne Opera House

Trulove – Clive Bayley
Anne Trulove – Miah Persson
Tom Rakewell – Topi Lehtipuu
Nick Shadow – Matthew Rose
Mother Goose – Susan Gorton
Baba the Turk – Elena Manistina
Sellem – Graham Clark

John Cox (director)
David Hockney (designs)
Robert Bryan (lighting)

The Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

There was much to enjoy in this final performance of Glyndebourne’s season. Perhaps first and foremost was the playing of the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski, every bit as fine as it had been for Billy Budd in June. The opening scene did not seem quite settled – this went for the singers as well – but thereafter, Jurowski proved highly alert to the score’s changing moods and underlying consistencies. The LPO responded with disciplined yet warm playing: razor-sharp rhythmically, yet more than usually allusive to Mozart. One can play The Rake’s Progress in a number of ways, and Stravinsky’s own polemical sardonicism will surely never be eclipsed, but Jurowski is clearly his own man here, as I recall from a performance a few years ago for the English National Opera. Then it had been Stravinsky’s Russianness, even in this work, that seemed most apparent; here the distanced affection for Mozart’s most tellingly artificial opera shone through. For though Don Giovanni inevitably springs to mind in terms of the subject matter, the orchestra is of course, knowingly, unmistakeably reminiscent of that for Così fan tutte. Stravinsky’s knowingness and Auden’s too are part of what makes this so unique a work: difficult, perhaps impossible, to warm to, but equally difficult not to be intrigued by and to admire.

Quite what the audience thought was so incessantly funny about it, though, even into the graveyard scene, I cannot imagine; it simply took a new or old character to arrive on stage for some to erupt into distracting mirthful commentary. However, this was an even less discerning crowd than usual – as witnessed by applause during the epilogue, a goodly number having failed to register that the music had not stopped. An oddity, though: was Jurowski’s card-playing at the relevant point for his own amusement or ours? I do not think it would have been visible to many, though the view of the orchestra was some compensation for my partial view of the stage from the standing room of the Upper Circle.

Singing was generally impressive too. Following a degree of unsteadiness in that opening scene, Miah Persson’s Anne proved as pure and beautiful of tone as in stage presence. Topi Lehtipuu judged Tom very well: guilelessly attractive, corrupted, and then tragic, without the slightest sense of overdoing it. Matthew Rose’s Nick Shadow was well sung but lacked malevolence, if only of a mock variety. Elena Manistina’s Baba overstated the silly, ‘exotic’ voice earlier on, but excelled in her subsequent babbling. As the characterful auctioneer, Sellem, Graham Clark’s wickedly camp portrayal will take some beating. The singing of the Glyndebourne Chorus, splendidly trained by Jeremy Bines, was beyond reproach, rhythmically and verbally alert.

What, then, of John Cox’s production? Whilst it was interesting to see this venerable creature, first staged in 1975, and I can imagine that many will feel considerable affection for it, it does seem something of a museum piece now. David Hockney’s designs provide a direct link with Hogarth himself, of course, but they are the principal attraction. Whilst the sparkle has worn better than, say, the Texan transposition of Robert Lepage’s Covent Garden production (even on its first revival), I think it might not be a bad idea to call time now. The pauses for scene-changing – after every scene – become wearisome and provide a reminder of how some things at least have changed for the better. Whilst less out of place here than they would be in many works, Stravinsky’s determined non-through-composing being highlighted, the dislocation seems accidental rather than dramaturgical. Still, thirty-five years is good going by any standards.

The Rake's Progress, Royal Opera, 22 January 2010

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Trulove – Jeremy White
Anne Trulove – Rosemary Joshua
Tom Rakewell – Toby Spence
Nick Shadow – Kyle Ketelsen
Mother Goose – Frances McCafferty
Baba the Turk – Patricia Bardon
Sellem – Graham Clark
Madhouse Keeper – Jonathan Coad

Robert Lepage (director)
Sybille Wilson (revival director)
Carl Fillon (set designs)
François Barbeau (costumes)
Etienne Boucher (lighting)
Boris Firquet (video)
Michael Keegan Dolan (choreography)
Rachel Poirer and Milos Galko (revival choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Stephen Westrop)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

First time around, I had rather liked Robert Lepage’s production of The Rake’s Progress, writing: ‘Lepage made a good case for the updating to 1950s America, for instance through his mention of Stravinsky's great interest in the new medium, delineation of Hollywood's 'false historicism', and citation of an essay in which Auden made clear his opposition to naturalism. The best case, however, was on stage, in which one was perfectly at liberty to consider the parallels between the setting and its original form, yet without feeling unduly constrained.’ A little later, I quoted Lepage saying that he had not ‘“set out to make a piece of social criticism, so the political and social dimension to the production has arisen through choices that seemed right to me”. This is interesting, since the political and social dimension came across strong and clear. Today's “celebrity”-fuelled culture, we were reminded, is in many respects nothing new, although it may somehow be even more vacuous than it once was. Hollywood and advertising, as we saw on stage, pursued this cult from the very earliest years, and the figure of Baba the Turk reminds us that notoriety was a great selling-point - literally - during the eighteenth century too. What could be more Hogarthian, post-war, or contemporary than setting off to the City in search of riches and losing them - and much else in the process?’

What, then, had changed? First, I suspect that the production itself is subject to diminishing returns. The Hollywood trappings – Nick Shadow filming, Tom Rakewell’s trailer, the swimming pool and so on – do not seem to offer up any more upon a second viewing. The loss of London grated rather more than it had, since the replacement did not seem adequate, an especially unfortunate moment coming during the third act when it was suggested that Tom had fled ‘to America’. Had he ever been away? Second, the revival direction seemed to me significantly less sharp than the original. Social criticism might not have been intentional the first time around, but it shone through nevertheless. Here, one wondered whether Hollywood were being enjoyed for its own sake; there was certainly little if any hint of McCarthyism. And third, the audience really did not help. Expecting anything much from the greater part of a Covent Garden audience is doubtless foolish, but this seemed to be an especially unimaginative, uncomprehending bunch. Applause and laughter could be heard all over the place, sometimes at the most truly inopportune moments. (What on earth was amusing about the graveyard scene?) The multiple alienations Stravinsky, Auden, and, one might at least have hoped, the production set before us went as pearls before swine; a friend of mine heard someone next to her exclaim that ‘the show’ reminded him of Hello, Dolly! Many of the people, moreover, would appear to have been deaf – rendering opera an eccentric choice for their evening’s ‘entertainment’ – since they could not even hear when numbers came to a close, applauding some time beforehand, sometimes whistling too (?!). These people, apparently determined to show off however much they have paid for their tickets, do not seem prepared even to attempt to think, and lessen the experience for the rest of us.

The musical performances varied. Patricia Bardon once again proved a strong Baba, touching in a way one rarely experiences, a trouper of the old school. (Stephanie Blythe had pulled out, likewise the anticipated Kate Royal as Anne Trulove.) There was nothing one could reasonably complain about in Kyle Ketelsen’s Nick, but he seemed to take time to warm up. Certainly by the second act, and then especially during the graveyard scene, he seemed properly possessed by the demon and his demons. Rosemary Joshua seemed to me a considerably stronger Anne than Sally Matthews had: purity of voice and character did not this time entail an inability to make her words tell, far from it. Graham Clark’s Sellem was more character actor than singer; his voice faltered alarmingly more than once. But sadly, the principal disappointment was Toby Spence’s Tom. There is a degree of blankness to the character, I appreciate, yet I was surprised nevertheless by Spence’s woodenness. The developmental aspect I noted to Charles Castronovo’s portrayal in 2008 was considerably less apparent. Moreover, there were times when the vocal line was not nearly so well shaped as it might have been. Choral singing improved, but was disturbingly unfocused in Mother Goose’s brothel.

Ingo Metzmacher’s account of the score ultimately proved puzzling, almost a mirror-image of that of Thomas Adès, whose conducting had proved the major drawback a year-and-a-half ago. There was much greater bite to the first two acts, a proper Stravinskian desiccation, which both repels and fascinates. For this, the fine form of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House must be credited. I longed for greater warmth – but that is just as it should be. To give in would be to risk collapse of the neo-classical conceit. However, the Bedlam Scene proved interminable, weirdly sentimentalised. Clearly a contrast was being drawn, but I wish it had not been, since much of the earlier good work was undone. Nothing though could quite detract from the brilliance of the graveyard scene, where Stravinsky achieves the near-impossible in harpsichord writing that does not make one long for the piano. Is this the mask dropping? It is probably just another mask, but at least the question is posed.

The Rake's Progress, Royal Opera, 14 July 2008

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Anne Trulove - Sally Matthews
Tom Rakewell - Charles Castronovo
Nick Shadow - John Relyea
Mother Goose - Kathleen Wilkinson
Baba the Turk - Patricia Bardon
Trulove - Darren Jeffery
Sellem - Peter Bronder

Robert Lepage (director)
Sybille Wilson (associate director)
Carl Fillion (designs)
Francois Barbeau (costumes)
Etienne Boucher (lighting)
Michael Keegan Dolan (choreography)
Boris Firquet (video)

Royal Opera House Chorus (chorus master: Renato Baldasonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Thomas Adès (conductor)

After reading a few reviews of earlier performances from this production of The Rake's Progress, I was not really looking forward to it, but Robert Lepage's production seemed to me to delve deeper than many critics had allowed. I had braced myself to overlook the absence of London from the stage but, the odd reference apart, I barely noticed it; even when I did, I could readily make a mental substitution, which did little harm. When I think about it, the laments about the absence of Hogarth's London from the stage seem unintentionally ironic, given the absence of eighteenth-century 'Idea' from Stravinsky's (very) pseudo-eighteenth-century style. In a programme note, 'Stravinsky in the early days of television,' Lepage made a good case for the updating to 1950s America, for instance through his mention of Stravinsky's great interest in the new medium, delineation of Hollywood's 'false historicism', and citation of an essay in which Auden made clear his opposition to naturalism. The best case, however, was on stage, in which one was perfectly at liberty to consider the parallels between the setting and its original form, yet without feeling unduly constrained. Auden, after all, was convinced - like his venerated Wagner - that myth was the stuff of opera, and myth by its very nature must transcend historical particularity.

Lepage writes that he did not 'set out to make a piece of social criticism, so the political and social dimension to the production has arisen through choices that seemed right to me'. This is interesting, since the political and social dimension came across strong and clear. Today's 'celebrity'-fuelled culture, we were reminded, is in many respects nothing new, although it may somehow be even more vacuous than it once was. Hollywood and advertising, as we saw on stage, pursued this cult from the very earliest years, and the figure of Baba the Turk reminds us that notoriety was a great selling-point - literally - during the eighteenth century too. What could be more Hogarthian, post-war, or contemporary than setting off to the City in search of riches and losing them - and much else in the process? Perhaps the setting that most impressed me was the updated Bedlam of the final scene. One need only have the most cursory or even intuitive understanding of Foucault to appreciate the dialectical relationship between modern liberal-capitalist society and the construction of 'madness'. This, in a sense, a construction that has been the story of the opera: Nick Shadow's 'project'. Here, at the end - bar the 'moral - one could see and hear at first hand what our society's barbarism does and has done to us. The relationship of such madness to art, even - perhaps especially - at its most neo-classical-Apollonian, is personified in the relationships between Tom, Anne, Baba, and of course Nick: the Devil - or Dionysus? - himself. In the asylum, the control-room atmosphere chimed perfectly with the ever-increasing tentacles of the administered society. This could doubtless all have been done in an eighteenth-century setting, but the relative distancing, both from our own time and from Hogarth's London, had the benefit, at least for some of us, of making us consider the parallels, the differences, and the historical progression - or regression.

It was the production rather than the musical performances that ultimately made the greatest impression upon me. I had no quarrel with any of the singers; indeed, I thought most of them very good. Charles Castronovo did not erase memories of the composer's Alexander Young (Sony), but then no one else ever has for me either. I wondered to begin with whether Castronovo was a touch anonymous, but then realised - whether by design or default, it hardly matters - that there was to be a great deal of development in his character. This is, however ironically, a rake's progress. Musically he had full command of the score and the intricacies of the libretto. Sally Matthews sang her part beautifully, although I often had difficulty, at least without glancing up to the surtitles, in understanding the words she was singing. This matters, when the libretto is one of the greatest ever penned. Anne's cabaletta, 'I go, I go to him,' was nevertheless exceptionally well done. John Relyea was a highly accomplished Shadow, chameleon-like in his re-invention, yet with a constant heart (?) of darkness to his very being. Patricia Bardon came across as both absurd and touching, a combination which seemed to me to penetrate to the very real heart of Baba. The choral singing was good, if not outstanding, although that must at least partly be attributed to the musical direction, which failed to impart the incisiveness the chorus required.

For my principal reservation lay with the conducting of Thomas Adès. Whilst enthralled by the production, I was so bored by the stodgy, oddly soft-centred approach to the first act that I briefly considered leaving during the interval. So eager, however, was I to see where the production would leave us next that this was not a serious option. However, the aggressive, polemical bite of Stravinsky's score was largely absent, without anything much other than drift to take its place. Matters improved considerably after the interval, although I have still heard much better. Rather to my surprise, the graveyard music, almost Schoenbergian in its remarkably unironic intensity, was splendidly handled, for which tribute must be paid both to the strings and to Christopher Willis on the harpsichord. With that execption, however, Adès, unlike Bardon, let alone Lepage, never seemed to me to penetrate to the heart of Stravinsky's apparently heartless score. This reminded of the mere cleverness I have often fancied I heard in Adès's own music - except here the conducting did not even seem especially 'clever'. Whereas, even when I have been most repelled by Stravinsky - I can accept his brand of neo-classicism much more readily than once I could - I have never doubted that there was a core to the music. By contrast, I have on several occasions wondered about the state of the imperial clothes in the case of Adès, never more so than when I heard The Tempest at Covent Garden, a work that evinced the aimlessness of Britten at his worst, albeit without the individual voice. (Lest this seem unduly harsh, contrast the gracious responses of John Adams and Steve Reich to Pierre Boulez's eightieth birthday with the sourness of Adès.) Despite that, which must be tribute indeed, I left Lepage's Rake - or, perhaps more properly, that of his company, Ex Machina - feeling that I liked and had been challenged by the work more than had been the case before.

The Rake's Progress, Royal College of Music, 1 December 2007

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

Tyler Clarke – Sellem, auctioneer
Lukas Jakobczyk – Trulove
Sadhbh Dennedy – Anne Trulove
Sigríđur Ósk Kristjánsdóttir – Mother Goose
Stephanie Lewis – Baba the Turk
Aaron McAuley – Nick Shadow
Jonathan Stoughton – Tom Rakewell
Philip Tebb – Keeper of the madhouse

Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra and Chorus
Michael Roswell (conductor)

Tim Carroll (director)
Soutra Gilmour (designer)
Giuseppe di Iorio (lighting)
Siân Williams (choreographer)

This was a wonderful evening in a wonderful theatre. (For those who do not know the Britten Theatre, it is a marvellously intimate space, with superb acoustics.) To hear a performance of this standard from student musicians of such a tricky work as The Rake’s Progress was a heartening experience indeed.

All of the voices showed great promise, and generally rather more than that. After a slightly wobbly start, Jonathan Stoughton’s Tom impressed, not least through his avoidance of too ‘English tenor’ a sound for the role. His acting convinced mightily, as did that of all the cast. By the time of the graveyard scene, we were truly moved by his plight, which was testament to his fine voice as well as to the production. Lukas Jakobczyk presented a virile bass, sensitively shaded where necessary, in the role of Trulove, whilst Sadhbh Dennedy carried off the difficult balancing act of beauty and blandness demanded by Anne. Her coloratura impressed, not least in her Act I cabaletta. Aaron McAuley’s Nick Shadow was not always quite so sure in his diction, but he presented an amusingly camp reading of the part, doubtless aided by the production. Sigríđur Ósk Kristjánsdóttir proved a worthy temptress as Mother Goose, clearly first amongst equals in her brothel. Stephanie Lewis navigated a steady course for Baba between caricature and undue sentimentality. The moment at which she revealed her bearded face shocked the London crowd and much of the audience too. Philip Tebb did not have much to do as Keeper of the madhouse but did it well, whilst Tyler Clarke was an excellent auctioneer, suave and sinister, yet full of humour too.

The chorus in its various roles, as whores and roaring boys, servants, citizens, and madmen, was excellent throughout. The antiphonal exchanges between men and women were especially well handled, crucial in allowing Auden’s clever rhymes to tell. Not only diction, but pitch and tone were also most impressive. Their choreography was very well conceived and executed too. Indeed, the production, with its stylish colouring of black, white, and red – handy for the role that playing cards play in the tale – told its story very well, without ever unduly drawing attention to itself. Stravinsky wrote that the work was ‘simple to perform musically,’ a claim I should contest in the extreme, ‘but difficult to realise on the stage’. This was certainly accomplished.

The Benjamin Britten International Opera School’s director, Michael Rosewell, was authoritative in his handling of the score: punchy and yet not without tenderness, and always sure of its treacherous twists and turns, from the opening bars’ homage to Monteverdi to the post-Don Giovanni non-moral after the curtain had gone down. The relentless ostinati propelled the action along in exemplary fashion, but the various soli also registered faultlessly and proved unfailingly willing in their decorative capacity. In this, the conductor was of course indebted to his superlative small orchestra, which could have put many professional counterparts to shame. Every section gave of its all. If special word there must be, then it should be awarded to James Southall on the harpsichord. What a weird and wonderful role Stravinsky allots to this alienated continuo, and how splendidly this was projected.

It is difficult, though not impossible, not to admire The Rake’s Progress, almost in spite of its polemical ultra-neo-classicism. Stravinsky was being more than usually disingenuous when he claimed that he wished to ‘release people from the argument and bring them to the music’. He wanted to do the latter, I am sure, but he was very well aware of how many would react and relished that prospect. But it has equally often been difficult to love, or even to like, the work. The performers’ evident success in doing so themselves must have proved infectious for a great part of their audience.