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SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL OPERA REVIEW
Both in the grand overview, and in almost every last detail, Pacific Opera Victoria’s Rake’s Progress is a triumph. Under the leadership, at once meticulous, inspired, and inspiring, of conductor Timothy Vernon and director Glynis Leyshon, music and drama alike were realized as consummately as I have ever experienced in the course of more than half a century’s acquaintance with this original and compelling masterpiece.
I would begin by saying that the cast was of uniform excellence, if it were not that uniformity was the last quality you could have detected in this brilliantly individualized group of genuine personages. Mia Lennox-Williams, elegantly beautiful as Baba the Turk, sported a beard that was by no means the only rarity on stage, considering that in Colin Ainsworth’s Tom Rakewell we were treated to a tenor who confounds our expectations of the type by being tall, slim, and intelligent. At the tender age of 26, and less than two years out of her schooling, Lucia Cesaroni looked and sounded just like Anne Trulove as Stravinsky and his librettists W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman must have conceived her–sweet, loyal, lyrical, and totally grounded in her sincerity and seriousness. In the less central roles of Trulove (Anne’s father), the brothel-keeper Mother Goose, Sellem the auctioneer, and the keeper of the madhouse, Chad Louwerse, Rebecca Hass, Blaine Hendsbee, and Steven De Vries filled out their respective areas of plot and characterization flawlessly. And, as Nick Shadow, Gregory Dahl sang sumptuously, while his surface affability barely concealed the unyielding malevolence that is what makes this devilish Old Nick tick.
Shadow’s first appearance on stage, indeed casting a shadow over the fragile idyll playing out in Trulove’s garden, immediately established the imaginative power of Allan Stichbury’s set. It consisted essentially of what the director’s note accurately described as “a series of sharply receding proscenium,” and the forced perspective that made the back of the stage much smaller than the front caused Dahl, actually a man of average height, to loom like a threatening giant behind and over the figures of Tom, Anne, and Trulove. He was accompanied by two shapely young fellow-shadows, unmentioned in the libretto, in the persons of Treena Stubel and Bryna Proskin; usually I dislike the directorial move of devising extra characters, but in this case the presence of these two silent acolytes added materially to the menace of all the subsequent proceedings.
Gerald King’s lighting played an integral part too, especially at those moments when the stage was dimmed down to a suitably old-fashioned limelight to heighten the intimacy of certain passages. Equally convincing was the exuberance of Nancy Bryant’s handsome costumes, including an outfit for Mother Goose that I might describe, taking a cue from the traditional “Parisian off-the-shoulder” style, as “off the bottom.” No complaints, either, about the visual and aural contribution of Pacific Opera’s chorus, trained by Robert Holliston (who also played the important harpsichord part), or about the polished and stylish playing of Timothy Vernon’s orchestra.
Why the “almost” in my opening sentence? Well, I thought Trulove’s reaction, when Tom learns that he is now a rich man, too enthusiastic in view of his fears about his prospective son-in-law’s firmness of character; and in Act 2, Scene 3, when Tom loses patience with Baba’s chattering, I regretted that Ms. Leyshon did not allow Tom, as prescribed in the stage directions, to silence his wife by plumping his wig down over her head; consequently, when Sellem removes it in the ensuing auction scene, we lost the joke of her continuing in mid-word as if no time had elapsed.
These are minor complaints in the context of a production that superbly realizes the beauty, the irony, and the sheer human insight of one of the 20th century’s supreme operatic achievements. It was surely, by the way, a brilliant idea to program the work in a season that will continue in February with Capriccio, Strauss’ and Clemens Krauss’ urbane conversation-piece about the nature of opera, and conclude in April with Mozart’s Così fan tutte, an important element in the inspiration underlying Stravinsky’s creation of The Rake’s Progress. The presentation of these three works in sequence adds up to a virtual master-class in opera for the Victoria company’s lucky subscribers.
Bernard Jacobson