The Rake's Progress at The Grange Festival: richly entertaining, but is there soul?

Even when Stravinsky's The Rake’s Progress is performed well – and last night at The Grange Festival, it was performed exceptionally well – it can be hard to pin down quite what you’ve been watching. Taking the Hogarth series of paintings as its storyboard, we know that the opera tells of the descent of the wealthy young heir Tom Rakewell to ruin and insanity. We also know the moral of the story: the Devil makes work for idle hands. But is this burlesque comedy, cathartic tragedy, an updated Faust? Or a simple morality tale, as the singers announce it to be in the closing chorus? Both the music and the libretto are so dripping with ironic detachment that it’s almost impossible to be sure.

Director-designer Antony McDonald starts off with Tom and his fiancée Anne Trulove in a pastoral earthly paradise, complete with tree and apple. The 18th-century costumes are carefully and elegantly crafted and the set designs are full of humour and easy on the eye. Nothing is excessively opulent; the sets and costumes are in service of the characters and the story, rather than trying to distract us from it.

You can view The Rake’s Progress as the struggle for Tom’s soul between Anne and the Devil, who arrives on the scene taking the name “Nick Shadow”. Beautifully as Alexandra Oomens sang Anne, from the moment Michael Mofidian came on stage as Nick, there was only going to be one winner. Mofidian has a huge voice, a combination of youthfulness and steel rare in a bass-baritone. To that voice, he added a stage swagger that was supremely confident whether faux-ingratiating or just plain malevolent.

For her part, Oomens delighted the audience with the sweetness of her tone and the earnestness of her commitment to the text. The music of The Rake’s Progress is considered to mark the end of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period, but it’s not just the music that’s neoclassical: WH Auden and Chester Kallman’s libretto is marvellously poetic in a way that harks back to the poetry of yesteryear and Oomens brought this to life throughout her singing, holding the audience in the palm of her hand for “Quietly, night”.

However, the show was comprehensively stolen by Rosie Aldridge as the bearded lady Baba the Turk. Far from being a grotesque, Aldridge sang the part with strength and beauty and made Baba into a larger-than-life character you couldn’t take your eyes off. From her carriage-borne entrance (the grande dame ordering everyone around), to lovingly offering her newlywed husband breakfast in bed (Turkish coffee and pastries, of course), to fury in “Scorned! abused! neglected!” or nobly yielding Tom to Anne’s goodness, every scene enchanted. And her departure to return to theatrical life (“Out of my way! The next time you see Baba you shall pay!”) was one of opera’s truly great exits.

Stravinsky’s score may be musical kleptomania, but it's elegantly done and while the episodes diverge wildly in character, they share a dry clarity. Tom Primrose and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra painted each picture vividly without ever drowning the singers. From the imposing brass fanfare that opens the piece, the brass and woodwind colours were a continual source of joy.

But it’s the character of Tom Rakewell that makes this a difficult opera. He is so weak, so feckless, so susceptible to being pulled in the direction of whatever stronger personality happens to be with him that it’s difficult to fully engage with him emotionally; my principal response was to pray never to be like that. Adam Temple-Smith sang Tom in a bright tenor voice that didn’t lack appeal: words were clear, phrases well turned, there was plenty of effortless purity. But he was unable to make me summon up authentic sympathy for Tom and therefore really care about what might happen to him.

So how to sum up this Rake’s Progress? It was certainly richly entertaining throughout, attractively set and replete with musical quality. But it only touched my emotions episodically, not in its dramatic arc as a whole. Perhaps that’s intrinsic in the piece.