Marking its 50th anniversary with a bold artistic choice, the Glimmerglass Festival unveiled its long-awaited company premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress: a 1950s opera wrapped in 18th-century musical forms and a moral parable. The production, conceived by conductor Joseph Colaneri and director-choreographer Eric Sean Fogel, proved not only theatrically dazzling and musically assured, but also conceptually unified. If ever there was an opera that demands tightrope precision while risking collapse under the weight of its theatrical conceit, The Rake’s Progress stands as the prime example. This staging walked that wire with confidence and clarity.
Rather than anchoring the production in the 18th-century world of Hogarth’s engravings, Fogel, in collaboration with the recently departed great stage designer John Conklin, relocated the action to the era in which Rake was composed. But their endeavor is neither a modernist reinvention nor a neoclassical pastiche. Like Stravinsky’s score and W.H. Auden and Chester Kalman’s libretto, the production is unapologetically referential, shaped by theatrical artifice, layered allusion, and deliberate distortion. Conklin’s set adorns the stage with sculptural abstractions: curved rods, neon tubes, constructivist-inspired shapes and exposed mechanics rendered in metallic hues and saturated reds reminiscent of a photographic darkroom. This is not Hogarth’s London. It is a mythic midcentury metropolis, shaped as much by cinema and advertising as by moral decay.
Surrealism, an aesthetic of deliberate accumulation, porous structure, and layered reference, is also evoked, mirroring the opera’s own collage of musical and poetic traditions. Classical fragments, pop spectacle and subconscious archetypes coexist naturally. A prop representing the silhouette of the Venus de Milo, alluding to the idealized figure conjured by Tom in his delirium, recalls not classical antiquity but Salvador Dalí’s dismembered Venus – an erotic ideal collapsed into nightmare and disillusion. Baba the Turk’s ‘cabinet of curiosities’ includes icons from a surrealist menagerie, such as a serpent and a unicorn skull, which appear both as projections on the backdrop and as masks worn by the chorus. Fogel’s choreography brings this dreamlike world into motion with relentless energy, always in service of dramatic structure. The result is kinetic, theatrical and attuned to the opera’s episodic form, while never upsetting the musical architecture.
Musically, the performance benefitted enormously from Colaneri’s incisive and disciplined direction. Though the score nods overtly to Mozart in orchestration and formal construction, Colaneri ensured that its modernist spine remained exposed: phrasing was taut, colors were dry and vivid and the forward motion rarely slackened. The Glimmerglass Orchestra responded with remarkable precision, navigating sudden metric shifts and tightly wound ensembles with poise. It was a performance that honored the score’s elegance and its underlying volatility – qualities echoed in the cast’s vocal delivery.
Adrian Kramer brought both vocal stamina and theatrical agility to the role of Tom Rakewell. Though his tenor was not especially large or resonant, it proved well-suited to the part’s musical demands: cleanly produced, supple and expressive across the role’s wide range. Fogel’s staging places significant physical demands on the performer and Kramer responded with clarity of movement and timing that mirrored the rhythmic control of his singing. From the wide-eyed declaration of “Here I stand” to the hallucinatory fragility of the final scenes, he charted Tom’s descent with nuance, resisting caricature even in moments of heightened absurdity.
As Anne Trulove, Lydia Grindatto sang with remarkable emotional clarity. Her voice suited the character’s moral constancy and quiet resolve, avoiding affectation in favor of directness and sincerity. Her Act I aria, “No word from Tom,” was shaped with control and expressive depth. Its classical form, charting a progression from mournful reflection to growing determination, came alive with urgency, shaped by her limpid phrasing and purity of tone.
Aleksey Bogdanov, as the ever-charming Nick Shadow, brought a dark-hued baritone and elegant menace to the Mephistophelean role. His scenes with Kramer were charged with tension, their vocal interplay shaped by precision and a sharp theatrical instinct. Deborah Nansteel gave a vivid performance as Baba the Turk, striking a balance between caricature and pathos. Her richly colored mezzo and commanding stage presence brought complexity to a role often reduced to comic excess. Presented here as a surreal emblem of celebrity and artifice, Baba became more than just a disruptive figure. In her outburst, “Scorned! Abused! Neglected!” Nansteel summoned real fury without losing the stylized contours of Stravinsky’s writing.
The Rake’s Progress is not an opera of visceral emotional immediacy; its brilliance lies in structure, irony, and philosophical provocation. Where does dreaming stop and madness start? Can Arcadia survive the temptations of the metropolis? These are not questions the production answers outright, but it poses them with clarity and style, leaving the audience to consider their relevance.
