Stravinsky wrote a kind of ballad opera — really a series of vignettes on Hogarth's model. It traces Tom's path beginning in the country, with his sweet if feckless love for Anne, and his inheritance. The messenger of good tidings is Nick, who whisks Tom away to London and teaches him that self-love is the law of nature, while obligation and morality are mere impositions on freedom.

Soon bored with pleasure and extravagance in Mother Goose's brothel, Tom shows his indifference to convention by marrying a circus freak, Baba the Turk, a bearded lady. Driven to distraction by her inane chatter, he collapses into a stupor and dreams of a machine to feed humankind by turning rocks into bread. Nick produces the machine on the spot and they launch a stock company. The resulting bubble bursts, leaving Tom sought as a criminal and his goods on offer at auction. These goods include Baba, whom Tom had silenced by covering up her head like a canary. The auction becomes a scene of chaos when she is uncovered and starts her babble again, just as Anne arrives, once more too late to save her hero but in time to be urged onward by Baba in her loving pursuit.

The opera closes with two compelling scenes. In a graveyard, after a year of service to Tom, Nick demands wages that are none other than Tom's death and damnation. The string opening is a Stravinsky masterpiece. Tom wins a final wager for his life, inspired by Anne's love to guess three cards Nick presents from a pack. But Nick strikes Tom insane as his Mephistopheles sinks down to hell, recalling Don Giovanni. In Bedlam, Tom dies happily mad, imagining himself as Adonis and Anne as Venus. A witty and superficial moral is sung by the entire cast.

The archaic, even mythic, feel of this moralizing story perfectly fit Stravinsky's musical inclinations as he rounded off the neoclassical phase of his career during the late 1940s. Starting in the 1920s, he had reworked forms from the 18th century and had reshaped, as his own, ideas from Pergolesi, Beethoven, and many others. In Rake, he builds the music around countless motives from composers of earlier times — Mozart above all. In the sweet music of the mad scene, he can look back to Tchaikovsky's rewriting of the 18th century in The Queen of Spades. Typically, however, the acid tonalities and off-balance rhythms of the score are very much of the 20th century, even while the musical forms and melodic recollections lend a decidedly old-fashioned air. The libretto's contrived, if often beautiful, language derives from the 18th century English poetry that had profoundly influenced Auden's own verse. For a modern audience, the phrases can sound at times like a foreign tongue (supertitles were in force).

All of this may seem too clever by half. Certainly, some people find it so. Yet Rake is said to be among the most frequently performed operas composed after Puccini's death. The reason lies in part with the chamber character of the score and its capacity to show well with reduced forces in the pit (some 25 musicians were found there in this production). But beyond such technical concerns, Rake balances a story of true, unquestioning love against a hard-edged sensibility in ways that suit the contradictions and paradoxes of modern life. The opera reproduces the modern combination of longing for simple values with awareness that they are too simple to be true — yet somehow remain true.

Anne Trulove is the spiritual center of the opera. Her country innocence combines with the fearless determination to leave her father's house to seek Tom in London. Her music often lies in familiar keys and recalls the age of melody in opera. Formidable enemies, above all Tom's ever-growing sense of unworthiness, keep the lovers apart. At the depth of Tom's libertine life, when Anne approaches him and Baba in the street after their marriage, he calls her "A milkmaid to whom I was in debt." Still, she is never out of his heart.

Rhoslyn Jones, a Merola artist in her West Bay Opera debut, brought vocal security and intensity to Anne's difficult music (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sang it in the 1951 premiere). No one, not even Baba, can doubt her love as she trudges fruitlessly after Tom. Yet Jones seemed miscast to me because her voice is rich and hefty, in texture almost like a mezzo, while the musical symbolism calls for the kind of crystalline transparency of tone most often cast in this role.

Tom's music also requires a virtuoso. Gerald Seminatore, in debut as Tom, came as close to filling the bill as any tenor likely to turn up on this small stage. His clear, bright voice, always on pitch and secure, flowed with grace through the long, complicated phrases Stravinsky wrote. For much of the evening, he did seem consistently loud, with little variety of tone, but he sang with a supple plangency in the mad scene.

Kirk Eichelberger, whose tall, commanding Don Giovanni filled the stage of this theater two years back, sent chills through the spine with his red hair, hard eyes, leather greatcoat, and penetrating bass notes. This Nick is the scariest I've seen. His voice can be edgy, and he does push it hard, but he uses it with theatrical flair.

The lovely Carla López-Speziale (debut), who was granted no more than a faint mustache as Baba the Turk, tossed off the role with panache and a lush mezzo. She could govern rhythm and pitch more precisely, but the beauty of her voice and her theatrical sense cannot be denied. Michael Mendelsohn deserves mention, too, as an entirely exceptional auctioneer.

The settings by Jean-François Revon and costumes by Richard W. Battle brought The Rake's Progress into the 20th century. The opening country scene might have been out of a 1930s comedy or The Fantasticks, complete with a vast orange moon and Anne's father in overalls (Douglas Nagel, and he is supposed to be of the gentry). Anne wears, throughout, something yellow and flowered, reminiscent of Dorothy in Oz. Later, the brick country house behind will become broken city walls, and the twisted black clouds will become more noticeable. Mother Goose (Ariela Morgenstern) in her brothel is a dominatrix barely covered by a sheer, short white negligee with leather bands that could have come from Vivenne Westwood's shop in 1970s punk London. Tom's luxurious house is a 1960s bachelor pad with prominent bar and large, flickering TV. Baba wears a sable coat that reveals a flowing white and black pants suit straight from Auntie Mame's closet. This is all well and good, if not especially coherent.

I wonder, though, if director Jonathon Field might have pushed the concept, and the designers, harder to produce an updating to our very own moment. It is not much of a stretch to compare today's excesses of wealth, luxury, corruption, and social polarization with those of the 18th century. Might Nick have been an Enron executive? Whatever the updating, one must of course have excessive touches, like turning the madman's crown Tom wears in Bedlam into the headpiece of an electroshock machine, and correlating the current flow with the final, deluded, trills Stravinsky wrote for him.

Mary Chun, the music director and conductor, effectively guided the players through the score's rhythmically intricate, syncopated texture, and through the constant ebb and flow of exposed solo lines. Stravinksy wrote for an orchestra of soloists here, and the pit did not disappoint. I did find Chun unable to catch the playful, dancing quality of the score, perhaps because of the sheer need to master it on short rehearsal schedules. But, on the whole, the touching sense of love triumphant came through all of the irony and wickedness.