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Torment of languor

Deborah Ross

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

The Rake's Progress (Royal Opera House)

Somehow the conductor has to contrive not to make the approfondissement too pronounced, otherwise the last part of the opera puts the whole earlier part in its place. Thomas Adès did not oblige: he took everything too slowly, so that the first half was a drag, the tedium palpable in the auditorium. And then he slowed down in Bedlam until it became a torment of languor. One had no feeling of contact between pit and stage, and the rather routine cast needed a lot more help than they ever got. Charles Castronovo as Tom, John Relyea as Nick, and Sally Matthews as Anne might be good in a better musical and scenic framework. Relyea is a singer with a majestically dark voice, and if he had been better directed he could have given us the creeps as the mock-genial Shadow should. The problem with Anne is how not to make her a duplicate of Carmen’s Micaela, as the composer recognised. She wasn’t exactly that here, but with this kind of setting she did seem too reminiscent of Natalie Wood, and her rather attractive voice needs a more compact setting than the Royal Opera. But then so does the Rake, though the sheer brilliance of its first performances in 1979 disguised that.

Baba the Turk will always be a problem, created to satisfy Auden’s craving for an acte gratuit. The music Stravinsky gave her is at least as irritating for the audience as for Tom, and although Lepage took the opportunity to camp things up to the maximum, with a rooftop swimming pool into which a tanned lifeguard dived, that merely emphasised that something was needed to conceal the threadbareness of both action and music at this point. Patricia Bardon sang well, and so did all the other minor figures. The powerful sense of being present at a flop could in no way be avoided, however.

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