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OPERA REVIEW
"The Rake's Progress" Goes The Right Way In San Jose
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By Heather Hadlock
In "The Rake's Progress," Opera San Jose offers a fiercely intelligent
work, intelligently staged and performed. If there are two ways to go
wrong with the "Rake" this company avoids them both. One temptation is to
overdo the opera's "inhuman" elements: its puppet-like characters, its
absurd and fragmentary plot, its ironical libretto and self-consciously
"historical" music. Another is to over-compensate for the mannered style
by belaboring the characters with more emotional reality than they can
support. Opera San Jose steers a satisfying course between these perils.
Dramatically, musically, and visually it keeps things simple, trusting the
score and libretto to be bitter and poignant, ironic and affecting by turns.
The effectiveness of this straight-ahead production is due in part to the
500-seat Montgomery Theater, which offers audiences a rare intimacy with
the performers and the work. The singers delivered Stravinsky's challenging,
sometimes perverse melodies with nuance and expression. With a very few
lapses they got across Auden's and Kallman's convoluted text (whose
convolutions the audience fully appreciates, thanks to the supertitles).
The orchestra of fewer than thirty players made a sufficient and generally
well-balanced sound under the meticulous leadership of the conductor Barbara Day Turner. It was a pleasure to hear the score's details so clearly: the solo trumpet so delicate it sounds like an English horn; the rustic woodwind choir; the ominous fog of cellos and violas roiling under
the graveyard scene; the little harpsichord flourishes to underline Nick
Shadow's sly winks and gestures.
As the opera progresses it belongs more and more exclusively to the tenor,
and Christian Fletcher, as Tom Rakewell, is more than up to his task.
While Rakewell's early scenes of callow youth provided limited dramatic
material, his arias of debauchery and regret were elegantly delivered. He
showed the Rake's belated progress toward human consciousness in the
graveyard scene, and the subsequent asylum scene was perfect. His deluded
cries never degenerated into ranting, and he gave the broken-hearted madman
genuine pathos. Fletcher's fragile appearance belies his vocal intensity,
and the precision of his final, Monteverdian plea to Orpheus and the nymphs
to "weep for Adonis" was at once touching and impressive.
Brian Leerhubert understood that the modern Prince of Darkness is more
salesman than necromancer, and he underplayed the "diablerie" in favor of
cynical philosophy. His sober black frock- coat, long braided wig, and
deft manipulation of the gullible tenor made a Nick Shadow closer to
Mozart's Don Alfonso than to Gounod's Mephistopheles. Leerhubert has a
rich, resonant sound, and sings intelligently, never losing the thread of
such lines as "The giddy multitude are driven by the unpredictable Must of
their pleasures and the sober few are bound by the inflexible Ought of
their duty."
The female leads, both making their debuts with the San Jose company, were
also very fine. The sweet-faced Christina Major is almost perfectly cast
as Anne, almost, because the girlishness she affected at the outset of
most scenes tended to veil her real voice. Whenever she dropped this
affectation, her rich, womanly soprano shone out. She achieved the right
Fiordiligian feel in her Act I scene and aria, "No word from Tom." For the
Asylum scene she abandoned girlishness altogether to sing a luminous
lullaby to Tom. Roberta Brickman, a petite and convincingly bearded Baba
the Turk, also settled into her role. Her patter song seemed underpowered,
but she dominated the Auction scene with a mix of broad comedy and
grandeur. Like Leerhubert, she sang with a fine sense for words and drama:
her solemn warning to Anne, "Then find him, and his man beware," stood out
clearly amid the manic rush of the Auction.
The simple set strikes a nice balance between abstraction and literal
details, consisting of one skewed, not-quite-rectangular platform with
various flies and flats to distinguish the several settings. The absence
of right angles playfully conveys the funhouse atmosphere of Tom's London
life. I would like to have seen Baba break a few "bibelots" during her
tantrum, and the auction scene was underfurnished, without any "curious
phenomena" to display, Sellem's virtuosic patter became unnecessarily
cryptic.
Props were used to better effect in the Graveyard Scene, with the
four weapons offered for Tom's suicide displayed beside his open grave,
each on its own marble pedestal; Shadow's oversized cards were visible from
the back of the house, and the spade clattered to the ground right on cue.
The climax of this scene, complete with lurid red lighting and smoke rising
from the grave, did teeter on the brink of heavy-metal kitsch. But I
forgave this excess when the lights dawned on the newly mad Tom singing his
gentle, broken ditty "With roses crowned."
Patrice Houston and Adam Flowers shone in their cameo roles as Mother Goose
the brothel- keeper and Sellem the auctioneer. The eleven-person chorus
not only gave a fine account of their tricky music, but also seemed to have a
wonderful time dressing up as wenches, "roaring boys," eager shoppers, and
lost souls in the galleries of poor Tom's private hell.
(Heather Hadlock is Assistant Professor of Music History at Stanford University.)
©1998 Heather Hadlock, all rights reserved
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