Halfway through The Rake’s Progress, the romantic heroine – decent, virtuous Anne Trulove – travels alone to London to rescue her fiance Tom Rakewell from the city’s glittering array of bad influences. She confronts him outside his townhouse. He’s all syncopated panic, she’s got poise and dignity to burn. It’s painful to watch, but there’s worse to come: his new wife, the bearded lady Baba the Turk – married solely for what we might now call “banter” – sits unseen in a sedan chair. Increasingly irate, she starts to interrupt Tom and Anne’s reckoning. A veneer of comedy overlays the obvious tragedy. Emotional sincerity is pitted against heavily drawn irony.
It’s a scene that epitomises the knowingness of this neoclassical collaboration between Stravinsky, WH Auden and Chester Kallman. It can, despite everything, be very funny. But it wasn’t in this new production at the Grange festival. Not for want of charisma from Rosie Aldridge’s Baba, who was a force to be reckoned with – physically assured and armed with a magnificent chest voice, her comic timing precise. The opera’s black humour nonetheless relies on a feeling of easy suavity in negotiating its rhythmic complexities that wasn’t yet in evidence either on stage or in the pit, where Tom Primrose conducted the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
