Opera
The Rake's Progress (Coliseum)
Doom and despond
Michael Tanner
ENO's new production of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress is quite good, but not quite good enough to silence any doubts one may have about the work's stature. There is no question that it is an expertly crafted piece, instantly recognisable in every bar as the work of its composer, and therefore automatically for many of us a source of delight, his own pleasure in his creation being, as usual, one of its salient features.
It is clear, too, that the work peaks in its final two scenes, the extraordinarily grim and minatory deserted brothel scene, where, with extreme economy of means, Stravinsky achieves an atmosphere of doom surpassing even that of Don Giovanni, the opera's model in many respects; and the 'Bedlam' scene, where the pathos is so intense, and developed at such surprising length, that the work seems to acquire a different nature from what it has had up to that point. Another of Mozart's operas which the composer said was much in his mind when he was composing The Rake was Cosi fan tutte, which reaches unexpected depths as it proceeds; but there it is a matter of people's feelings getting out of hand, whereas in The Rake it seems more a matter of perhaps the librettists, more obviously the composer, letting themselves go, an almost unthinkable thing with such Apollonian artists.
The 'Epilogue', allegedly there to point out the moral, a sufficiently obvious one, is not the parallel to the one in Don Giovanni that it hopes to be. In Mozart's opera, whatever the surviving characters say, what they show is that the amoral force that has departed was what endowed them all with life. In The Rake it does look more as if the Epilogue's sole function is to restore us to the uncaring state in which we have been for most of the evening, and which the creators want to persuade us that they never abandoned, It seems to me a creditable thing, even if it costs a work its integrity, if it gets out of hand; but for these creators the centre of their aesthetic was integrity, the integrity of exclusion, so their effort must be seen as fundamentally flawed, for all its frequent enchantments.
As usual with Stravinsky, one of the things about The Rake is that it allows its interpreters little latitude. Stravinsky is the great control-freak among composers, a charge to which he would have readily agreed. And for anyone who has seen the long-running Glyndebourne production, with its celebrated Hockney settings, it seems to have achieved its near-definitive form there.
Above all The Rake is self-consciously stylish, and it revels in its artificiality, which it teasingly suggests is something akin to petrifaction, by evoking a world of poised classicism. The visual side of any performance must honour that just as much as the musical account. That is something that the ENO production, by Annabel Arden, with designs by Yannis Thavoris, firmly refuses to do. As so often now, what we get is settings more or less contemporary with the time of the work's composition, leaving the abyss between text and action on the one hand and what we see on the other, to be covered by the word 'deconstruction' (there is no concept, because no thinking is involved).
The opening scene suggests a semi-parody of rural post-war England, Dad smoking his pipe, the youngsters doing a masque; so green-wellies is the ambience that only a copy of The Spectator is missing. Thereafter we have underfurnished crepuscularity, the permanent resort of cash-strapped opera companies. But atmosphere is too sadly lacking, so that the opera's weaker scenes, such as 'Mother Goose's brothel' and the 'Auction', fail to come to vivid enough life, and one notices the threadbare condition of the music.
The three principals are excellent performers, but not at their best in these roles, anyway when interpreted in this way. Barry Banks, the Rake, projects in his voice, appearance and acting the loveable nerd, which makes him an attractive Nemorino. The plangency in his tones can easily sound petulant, and that is one of the troubles with Tom Rakewell which needs to be played down. He doesn't seem to have enough vitality to be a plausible rake, so the only other option is decadent languor; Banks can't manage either of those, and seems nothing more than a nice guy always doing the wrong thing — a subject for a different morality play.
Banks is touchingly diminutive, while Gidon Saks, Nick Shadow, is vast. The contrast between them tends to be nothing but comic, in an obvious Laurel-and-Hardy way. They try to develop a suggestion of a homoerotic relationship, which seems silly, even if Banks does rest very conveniently on Saks's lower chest when standing. Saks has a magnificent voice, and a striking presence, but he plays Nick too hammily. Lisa Milne's Anne is grandly sung, but she takes the maternal interpretation of this unspecific role, and you feel she could easily put Tom under her arm and walk home with him, the best thing for all concerned. And yet there was a great deal of pleasure to be had from the music, thanks to the keen but relaxed conducting of Vladimir Jurowski, who will no doubt, and welcomely, be in charge of the next Glyndebourne revival,
Previous page
