Auspicious beginnings: The Rake’s Progress at Wilton’s Music Hall
The Rake’s Progress
OperaGlass Works
Wilton’s Music Hall
Balcony A34, £15
22 November 2017
Wilton’s page
Auden’s wry lesson at the end of The Rake’s Progress was overwritten by one far more serious: don’t sit in Wilton’s balcony for opera. Of the many excellent young singers involved, Robert Murray as Tom was the only one from whom I could hear more than about 10% of the words. Not being able to see/hear the text presents for almost any opera, I find, an unshiftable cap to enjoyment, and in The Rake’s Progress seems a particular pity.
I have one other negative thing to complain about, which I’ll group here because the rest is all positive. Every time I have seen or heard The Rake’s Progress previously, live or recorded, I have found the Bedlam scene appallingly sad, a very deep rebuke to the opera’s imposed designation as ‘cold’. This time, not so much. The muting of the words will have been a factor but I wonder if also this is the one scene in the opera that benefits from a dose of realism, or at least stylization that invokes a sense of Bedlam’s awful reality. Not, in short, a vamped-up chorus looking like they’d just popped out of Mother Goose’s brothel, or Tom pootling about on stage with a silk scarf looking quite content.
Well, if misstep this was it was the only one in OperaGlass Works’s inaugural production, an auspicious start indeed that hopefully augurs well for the future of high-quality chamber opera in London. The soloists were all of professional standard and, intelligibility aside, were all well able to absorb the demands of Stravinsky’s score. Judicious expenditure on certain costumes made for some nice effects – particularly a gaudily ‘Turkish’ Baba the Turk, and conductor Laurence Cummings a recognizable onstage Hogarth. Not all of the Southbank Sinfonia soloists were of the singers’ standard, the string quartet and bassoonists feeling occasionally improperly exposed. But in almost every sense this was a slick and professional production of a challenging and rewarding musical work that is a delight to see whenever it is performed to this high a standard.
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