Opera review
New Opera finds humanity in Stravinsky’s rarely staged Rake’s Progress
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(From left) Martin Ng, Lara Tan, Philipp Heo and Martin Ohu in the cast of New Opera Singapore's The Rake's Progress.
PHOTO: CHRIS P LIM
Geoffrey Lim
- Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress explores moral austerity and hedonism through a newly rich man’s downfall, blending musical pastiches and a moralistic libretto by Auden and Kallman.
- New Opera Singapore’s staging at Victoria Theatre balanced irony and warmth, highlighting the opera’s contradictions with strong orchestral and vocal performances.
- The production possessed humanity and wit, but lacked the full rakishness and dramatic edge of the characters, especially in the lurid and camp scenes.
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The Rake’s Progress
New Opera Singapore
Victoria Theatre
Sept 6, 7.30pm
Stravinsky’s only full-length opera is one of the cleverest operas around, mixing pastiches of everyone from Monteverdi to Verdi into a tale about a newly rich fop who goes mad after succumbing to the gospel of hedonistic self-actualisation.
Its rather uncharitable view of humanity has a moral austerity oddly resonant in Singapore: a seemingly uncomplicated nostalgia for bourgeois family values; a suspicion of unlicensed desire as fatally dangerous; a judgment on individual gratification as a dereliction of duty.
The deus ex machina comes in the form of a rich and recently deceased uncle who bestows Tom Rakewell (the titular rake) his fortune. The complacent sermonising of the characters following Tom’s downfall is the last click in the gears of the opera’s moralistic machinery – a pat closure enacted in miniature by the deft neo-Popean rhyming couplets that pepper every page of W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman’s extraordinary libretto.
New Opera’s dashing staging of the opera skilfully captured the fascination of these contradictions: warmly performed despite the neoclassical detachment of the score and its characters, with a sense of irony on just the right side of ridiculous, as when Baba the Turk marches victoriously into the sunset in Act 3.
The orchestra played delightfully, with Chan Wei Shing’s elegant, energetic conducting making the most of the score’s genre-bending wit, such as the invocation of Monteverdi’s Orfeo at the outset or the glances at Soave Sia Il Vento from Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte in Mother Goose’s brothel.
South Korean tenor Philipp Heo’s Tom had superb presence, flair and some truly impressive vocal technique (if also some slightly unidiomatic pronunciation in the secco recitatives).
His Rakewell was a reluctant libertine, an anti-Don Giovanni who, in contrast to his libidinous antecedent, proved constitutionally unable to repress his petit bourgeois aversion to sexual transgression. He barely batted an eye at the temptations on offer at Mother Goose’s house of sin and went along with Nick Shadow’s Mephistophelean incitements to pleasure with a half-heartedness that was morally commendable, if dramatically misjudged.
Indeed, Rakewell seemed world-weary from the very outset of his rake’s journey, robbing the character of some of its already patchy development arc from fortune-hungry ingenue to bored immoralist to puling lunatic, half-redeemed, in a Wagnerian twist, through the love of a pure woman.
The only thing that seemed to truly excite him – in oddly Singaporean fashion – was the opportunity to make a quick fortune with Shadow’s magical bread machine.
Rakewell’s fateful decision to wed Baba the Turk was less a grand statement of nihilism, more an act of coercion by the overweening, black-suited Nick, trenchantly performed by Martin Ng with all the unctuousness of a wealth manager.
While Ng’s Shadow was impressively sung and possessed of a Kim Jong Un-esque hairdo, whose upturned fringe suggested the horns of a devil, he was occasionally a little too earnest, lacking some of the dark charisma the character needs to lead Tom astray.
Lara Tan as Anne Truelove brought a youthful charm to the role and a touching solicitousness in the Bedlam scene, though she could have conveyed a little more of the steeliness underlying the character’s inexplicable loyalty to Tom in numbers such as I Go To Him.
Indeed, the one potential criticism of this otherwise stylishly played and conscientiously assembled production is that it was not rakish enough.
Perhaps mimicking Tom’s own unease, the production sometimes felt slightly uncomfortable with the luridness of the Mother Goose scenes, the manic salesmanship of the auctioneer Sellem, or the high camp of Baba the Turk, the only character truly at home with their operatic nature (here beautifully, if perhaps too shyly, sung by the excellent Chan Wei En).
But this hardly detracted from a deeply pleasurable performance that was warm, gracious and witty at all the right moments.
Kudos to New Opera for staging this rarely heard work and imparting it with a humanity that its detractors sometimes miss.
