Sublime Stravinsky

The Rake’s Progress; Il signor Bruschino
Peacock Theatre

Just before the opera season gets under way each year, British Youth Opera puts on a couple of operas, or this year three, with three performances each, at the newly comfortable Peacock Theatre, off Kingsway. Few people go, since BYO treats the enterprise as a jealously guarded secret, and makes sure that you need detective skills to discover what and when, and never tells you, even if you’re as well disposed a critic as I am.

This year the show which is really outstanding is their production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, at least the equal of any that I have seen of this problematic work, and in some respects superior. I’d like to march the performers of all opera companies to it, to feel the impact of a performance in which you can hear every word — well, there is the odd casualty, but generally that stands: and not with D’Oyly Carte enunciation, but treating the music as the vehicle through which the dramatic or expressive force of the text is realised. It sounds like Wagner sung by Germans used to until it degenerated into international mush. The impact is extraordinary, with scenes that have often seemed to me too long, or not evidently required at all, taking on a required place in the development of the rake’s progress, broken-backed as that is, thanks to Auden’s ineptitude and infatuation with his own conceits, or perhaps to the differing ideas he and his co-librettist had. Since none of the characters except for Nick Shadow has any character, it is up to the singers and the director, William Kerley in this instance, to give them some. Anne Trulove is a hopeless case, but Rhona McKail, playing her as a dowdy provincial girl, and singing with intensity, does as well as anyone I’ve seen or heard.