Is Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress anything more than an exercise in style? ‘I will lace each aria into a tight corset,’ Stravinsky told Nicolas Nabokov, and for most of three acts that’s pretty much what he does, deftly fitting W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman’s libretto to a steadily chugging parade of his smartest, pertest neoclassical tricks. The motor-rhythms, the acid harmonies, the borrowings from Mozart, Rossini and Handel: it’s all brilliantly accomplished and supremely knowing.
In small doses, it’s appetising enough, and even at full length there’s much to enjoy — especially when played with the relish that Sir Andrew Davis and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra brought to this concert performance. The Usher Hall acoustic couldn’t blur the sheer exuberance with which the SCO players brought out the primaries and pastels of Stravinsky’s score: whirring strings, blowsy trumpets and a pair of slithering, snorting bassoons who clearly felt the whole piece had been written as a double concerto just for them.
The real problems with The Rake’s Progress are in the foreground; problems which, paradoxically, come into sharper focus when it’s performed this well. The various grotesques with which Auden and Kallman peopled their Hogarth-based scenario make for delicious cameos, and both Alan Oke, smarming and fussing for Scotland as the auctioneer Sellem, and Susan Bickley — just sufficiently over-ripe as Baba the Turk, complete with purple harem pants — found an ideal mixture of absurdity and pathos. Of the three central figures, Emily Birsan’s poise and sunny voice as Anne Trulove made her an excellent match for Andrew Staples’s cringing Tom Rakewell: the purity of her tone suggested the possibility of redemption — musically, at least — for Staples’s slightly querulous tenor.
With characters who are essentially line drawings, it’s hard to ask for much more — any more than one could expect either of them, really, to stand much of a chance against the opera’s sole fully realised figure.
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