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The Rake's Progress
“Gerald Finley in the meantime was a highly subtle Nick Shadow … His presence was unsettling, erect and watchful, and far more sinister than any amount of villainous loping.”The Independent
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Composer |
Igor Stravinsky |
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Librettist |
WH Auden and Chester Kallman after Hogarth’s 8 engravings |
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Venue and Dates |
Glyndebourne 16, 19, 21, 24, 26 August 2000 |
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Conductor |
Mark Elder |
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Production |
Director: John Cox Sets and costumes: David Hockney Lighting: Robert Bryan |
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Performers |
Tom Rakewell: Richard Croft Nick Shadow: Gerald Finley Anne Trulove: Rosemary Joshua Sellem: Ryland Davies Trulove: Stafford Dean Mother Goose: Nuala Willis Baba the Turk: Susan Bickley Madhouse Keeper: Daniel Broad |
What the critics say
Tom Sutcliffe for the Evening Standard, 11 August 2000
Hockney still a star
Thanks to David Hockney's fantastic designs, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress has become a Glyndebourne icon. After 25 years its gimmick still doesn't fade.
Hockney and Hogarth combine well - crosshatching like 18th century prints to fill in texture, and clean modern outlines. Hogarth's series gave the opera its name. And Hockney's fame carried the show around the world, especially after the Scala had made a large format version that was popular in North America. As the show's fame spread, opera companies drawn to Stravinsky's challenging masterpiece could see no better option.
With each tableau so well structured by Hockney, John Cox's production can be simple stuff - mostly demonstrative up-front theatre. That doesn't suit everyone in this cast. The delicious Auden text sometimes fails to ignite. Richard Croft as Tom Rakewell is an elegantly musical tenor. But with limited charm and not much evident appetite for pleasure and fun, it's hard to believe he would be naive enough to almost lose his soul.
Gerald Finley is excellent as Nick Shadow, the devil figure and manservant. But as well as singing superbly, Finley needs a Tom who is a strong foil to play off. Ryland Davies as the manic auctioneer Sellem is miscast too. Davies makes him a self-obsessed tetchy egoist. With an extrovert playing this gift role, you can see Sellem must be a class act as an auctioneer. Davies, alas, seems less concerned about his customers than about himself.
Rosemary Joshua catches perfectly the sweet, anxious sentiment of irresistible Anne Trulove, floating some beautiful and open top notes. Nuala Willis's brothel madam acts brain-dead and bossy with frightening conviction, and Susan Bickley's marvellous Baba the Turk should be even more unstoppable.
Mark Elder's conducting is ponderous and pernickety. It needs a bit more dash and sparkle.
Fiona Maddocks for The Observer,
August 13 2000
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,353551,00.html
…David Hockney, in crimson slippers and matching tie, was in the audience to watch the fifth revival of The Rake's Progress. His designs (revivified last time round in 1994), striped and bright as a stick of rock, serve up a witty counterpoint to the austerity of Stravinsky's score.
Since its first staging in 1975, this John Cox production has always been one of Glyndebourne's most celebrated. To imagine Stravinsky's Faustian neo-classical opera after Hogarth done better or indeed done in any other way at all is now impossible. Rosemary Joshua, Gerald Finley and Richard Croft led a superb cast. Mark Elder, a conductor whose energy and insight in the pit rarely disappoint, drew strong, pithy playing from the London Philharmonic, revealing this prickly dark work in all its strangeness and parody. As Duke Ellington once observed, 'New music? Hell, there's been no new music since Stravinsky'. He was talking 30 years ago. You still know what he meant.
Anna Picard for The Independent
Published: 13 August 2000
http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article258075.ece
If opera makes you nervous, start here
When David Hockney's witty, pretty, cross-hatched production of The Rake's Progress first opened in 1975, I was making farmyard animals out of sugar-paper with my best pair of round-ended scissors. Twenty-five years is a long time - even in the 400-year life of this most hit and miss art-form - but this Rake is a classic, and in a revival that boasted strong leads, sharp conducting and superlative chorus work, it was Hockney's scenery that stole the show.
The production looked crisp as cotton; the colours perfectly balanced, the monochrome auction scene breathtaking, the profusion of Hogarthian artefacts as exciting as a pillowcase full of Christmas presents (with enough anachronistic in-jokes to keep any art historian chuckling), and the Cubist grotesquerie of Bedlam deftly poised between horror and humour. Could Hockney's Rake have been Glyndebourne's insurance policy against the grungily provocative post-postmodern gestures of this season's Mozart trilogy? The only possible downside to all this pleasure - and what a tight-lipped sourpuss you'd have to be to be at all offended by it - was that the audience's delight in the scenery was so enthusiastically expressed as to obscure some of the music. But how often do you go to an opera where people are genuinely entertained to such a degree that they cannot restrain their applause?
For anyone who is nervous of opera, Auden and Stravinsky's sophisticated pantomime is a perfect place to start. One of The Rake's Progress's major charms is that it is in no way an "important" opera (Stravinsky had been experimenting with neo-classicism for a good 10 years before the intrinsically playful Rake); it is a cleverly accessible confection of satire, style and self-consciousness. The libretto is in English, no one sleeps with their immediate family, there's no sexism or racism (even the Federation of Hirsute Turkish Ladies should be mollified by the sympathetic portrayal of Baba), there are plenty of jokes, no one sings the same words over and over again unless ironically, and - gasp - there are tunes. For all the nods at Mozart, his predecessors, and even Russian operatic traditions, The Rake's Progress was written against the slickly melodic contemporary cultural backdrop of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Gershwin brothers. I'd hazard a guess that if you like Sondheim, Bernstein or even Cabaret, you'd enjoy this.
The cast was vibrant, the quintet of the epilogue as creamily blended as the finest a capella group. To her great credit, the marvellous Susan Bickley looked, and frequently sounded, totally ridiculous as Baba the Turk. So what if her accent sounded like Dr Ruth after a few years in Glasgow? Her raging, wild top notes and dirty growl of a chest voice raised hairs and knocked her insipid husband Tom for six. Rosemary Joshua as Anne gave a sweet-natured, fully engaged performance, her voice neatly connected to body and text. Gerald Finley in the meantime was a highly subtle Nick Shadow. Finley has played a long game with his gleaming, metallic baritone voice, developing its power and range steadily over the last decade, and he is now reaping the rewards of that careful work. Shadow's strangeness was shown in off-timed gestures; standing slightly too close in dialogue, echoing the gestures of his mortal pawns a little too late or a little too long, as though studying a humanity alien to his nature. His presence was unsettling, erect and watchful, and far more sinister than any amount of villainous loping.
As Finley and Joshua were so good - and Bickley, Stafford Dean (Trulove) and Nuala Willis (Mother Goose) an excellent supporting cast - it made life harder for Richard Croft as Tom. All the necessary elements were there - the super-sweet crooning, the feckless innocence, the foppish boredom, and the awful regret for what he has lost through his Faustian pact with Shadow - but they failed to cohere. Perhaps it was the distracting tennis-player's grunt that popped out at the end of his higher, louder phrases, or perhaps it was the lack of middle ground between soft and loud. I found myself wondering how the production might have gone with John Mark Ainsley as Tom; and had Croft been truly convincing, I wouldn't have had time to play fantasy opera.
Mark Elder and the LPO were on terrific form. Elder's direction is so characterful and stylish that the odd bumpiness in the tempi scarcely matters. Even in the graveyard scene, as Tom and Shadow play cards for Tom's life to the accompaniment of the insane, beautiful harpsichord solo, Elder was on the case, scooping more and more miserable regret from Tom's recitative. There's hardly room here to cover the chorus work, but they were magnificent; fresh of voice and energetically responsive to the excellent direction of John Cox. This was Glyndebourne at its finest, and you can forgive all the hidden costs in bar-tariff and programmes and sub-standard Mozart for this one delightful production - which was, I suppose, the point.