How to make Stravinsky swagger

Opera

The Rake’s Progress

The Grange Festival, Hampshire

★★★★★

Any new designer of Stravinsky’s opera must tussle with the legacy of David Hockney’s influential designs for Glyndebourne in 1975, still being used onstage and reproduced on a thousand posters, websites and souvenirs. Antony McDonald, who has designed and directed the Grange’s production, has gone for a clean and classical approach that is more akin to Thomas Gainsborough than the William Hogarth paintings the 1951 opera is based on.

When we first meet lovers Tom Rakewell (Adam Temple-Smith, right) and Anne Trulove (Alexandra Oomens, below right), they are ready to settle into a comfortable life. But things go wrong when Tom is lured away to London by the devilish Nick Shadow (Michael Mofidian), and ends up in a grey-walled asylum. There is plenty of swagger from the Grange Festival Chorus in the city scenes, but the colour drains away in the final tombeau-like tableau.

Before his downfall, Tom should be a character of vaulting ambition: Temple-Smith sings with welcome brightness but is surely too much of a wimp – Mofidian’s Shadow beats him hands down, as his biting baritone captures the stage. Yet Temple-Smith’s understated performance allows Tom to emerge with true pathos as a wan, deluded asylum inmate imagining himself to be Adonis waiting for Venus.

As the ever-constant Anne, Oomens sustains an excellent concentrated tone. Thanks to WH Auden and Chester Kallman’s fine libretto, there are lots of diversions along the way, including an unusually sympathetic Baba the Turk from Rosie Aldridge.

The principals are all well directed but a doubt remains about the musical realisation. While there was gracefulness in Tom Primrose’s direction of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, there was not enough of the confident incisiveness required. Stravinsky’s exuberance was captured; his lyricism was too subdued. There is, however, time for this to improve in later performances.

Until July 6; thegrangefestival.co.uk