Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Welsh National Youth Opera, Tim Rhys-Evans, Musical Director, Weston Studio, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 16.7.2007 (GPu)
Conductor: Tim Rhys-Evans
Director: David Newman
Set and Costume Designer: Christopher Giles
Lighting Designer: Elanor Higgins
Vocal Coach: Miriam Bowen
Movement Director: Dominic Leclerc
Repetiteur: Jeff Howard
Tom Rakewell: Wyn Davies
Anne Trulove: Natalya Romaniw
Nick Shadow: David Thaxton
Baba the Turk: Rhian Lois Evans
Trulove: Karl McGuckin
Mother Goose: Sophia Holland-Thomas
Sellem: Matthew Ibbotson
Keeper of the Madhouse: Llio Evans

Though I have long admired The Rake’s Progress – as heard on the radio/recordings and seen on Video/DVD – this was the first time I had had the chance to hear and see it ‘live.’ Doing so has increased my admiration for the work yet more – and to be able to say that is, in itself, to pay considerable tribute to the young cast of Welsh National Youth Opera, to the small orchestra (largely made up of students from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Cardiff University) and to their more experienced mentors, coaches, directors etc.

This is an opera which benefits from intimacy. Both the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House were keen to mount the premiere of The Rake’s Progress, but Stravinsky’s preference was for a production at La Fenice in Venice, since he believed that the smaller stage would be more suited to the work. Here, in the limited confines of the Weston Studio in the Millennium Centre, a simple, flexible playing area at floor level, with a small number of well-chosen props and with the orchestra more or less hidden behind stage hangings, proved admirably suited to an intelligent, inventive production (in which the inventiveness was always appropriate and never merely gimmicky). The small space meant that the young singers were not obliged to force their voices and the audience could be directly addressed (as in the Epilogue) in a manner that made real sense.

In reviewing last year’s WNYO production of Bernstein’s Candide, Bill Kenny wrote of how impressed he was by "the astonishing sense of teamwork and complete lack of personal self-centredness" that characterised it. The same goes for its successor this year. For all that The Rake’s Progress is a work which closes with the explicit drawing of a moral, I refrain from drawing another moral about ‘adult’ opera companies … There was a tremendous joie-de-vivre about the whole thing, and the performers’ evident enjoyment fully transmitted itself to the audience. But there was more to its success than that alone.

For a start it was blessed with some impressive soloists. Absolutely nobody let the side down but one or two individuals inevitably stood out. As Anne Trulove, nineteen-year-old Natalya Romaniw, currently a student at the Guildhall, gave a performance of remarkable maturity, her voice full and controlled, her high notes ringing and her stage presence utterly sympathetic; she charted a movement from an initial girlish love to moving dignity in her closing appearance as the Venus to mad Tom’s ‘Adonis’. She, surely, is someone of whom we shall see and hear much more. Though not so obviously gifted vocally, David Thaxton was a compelling Nick Shadow, initially unctuous and then convincingly menacing, an ominously supervisory presence until his eventual ‘defeat’. Wyn Davies sustained a demanding role pretty well, not least in a supremely affecting performance in the closing stages of Tom’s downfall as part of a genuinely harrowing interpretation of the madhouse scene. Rhian Lois Evans was a delightful bearded lady, her Baba growing from initial selfishness to final generosity and the reassertion of her independence, while Karl McGuckin was solid and judicious in the less obviously rewarding role of Trulove.

WNYO’s age limits are 14-25, and a number of the chorus must have been quite close to the younger end of that age range. They acquitted themselves quite splendidly, both vocally and in terms of movement and stage presence; the chorus of the senior WNO is one of the company’s great strengths – I wonder if perhaps we were hearing one or two of their successors here?

Throughout the balance of voices and orchestra was excellent; the sympathetic conducting of Tim Rhys-Evans and, no doubt, the earlier work of voice coach Miriam Bowen (who herself appeared in the famous 1975 Glyndebourne production of the Rake) were major contributory factors here. The opera’s libretto by Auden and Kallman is a marvellous piece of work, complex and subtle enough to be fascinating on its own account ("Our proper employment / is reckless enjoyment") but never limiting (stimulating rather?) Stravinsky’s musical options. How good it was to be able to hear so much of the libretto so clearly and to appreciate the relationship between words and music.

The Rake’s Progress is a witty, but also a profound work. The libretto alludes to both Marlowe and Goethe, and to a wealth of classical myth amongst many other literary and cultural references, just as Stravinsky’s music alludes to Mozart and much else. It is a work pitched on the grotesque boundary between comedy and tragedy. Here is an imperceptive Faust figure who gets, not Helen of Troy, but Baba the Bearded Lady, a ‘Faust’ easily fobbed off with an automatic bread-making machine (it makes bread from stones, which sets up another set of allusions). This ‘heroic’ figure saves his soul – or at least he saves it from going straight to an otherworld Hell, finding himself, instead, in Bedlam (even if his imagination transforms it both to Elysium and the Stygian fields). Inevitably there were dimensions of this rich and subtle work that eluded these young performers – inevitably, if for no other reason than their relatively limited experience of the world. But they – and their slightly older ‘mentors’ – should be very proud of themselves. This was a coherent, moving, entertaining interpretation of one of twentieth century opera’s most intriguing works.

The performance I was able to attend was the last of four. There were some slight cast differences at earlier performances.

Glyn Pursglove