The Rake’s Progress

Usher Hall

Keith Bruce

IN interviews around the launch of his first Festival, Fergus Linehan acknowledged caveats about his programme’s apparent paucity of staged opera, making the financial excuse, but just half way through week one the situation looks rather healthier in reality than on paper, with much still to be heard and seen during EIF 2015.

There was a lot of homegrown talent on stage in this performance of Stravinsky’s mid 20th century masterwork, which was much more than a mere “concert” version. Behind Sir Andrew Davis and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, playing with perfect precision on music that is not seen as their core repertoire, with the crucial wind soloists particularly outstanding, was a “scratch” choir of 36 singers from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, drilled by Timothy Dean into a crisp and dynamic force, and later adding other crucial voices to the narrative.

The witty libretto, by WH Auden and Chester Kallman, needs little in the way of staging when it is as clearly expressed by a chorus and a cast as fine as this. Andrew Staples was an eloquently clear-voiced Tom Rakewell, American soprano Emily Bursan as pure-toned and expressive as Anne Trulove, and Gidon Saks the perfect definition of the Mephistophelean in vocal tone as Nick Shadow. Susan Bickley’s Baba the Turk and Catherine Wyn-Jones (brothel keeper Mother Goose) supplied glorious character studies and Alan Oke put in a scene-stealing turn as Sellem the auctioneer in a scene that was the high point of the evening, even if Bickley spent it under a table cloth, with the RSC singers supplying the bidding.

Not a moment of narrative was lost in performance that could scarcely have been more lucid, but used the bare minimum of costuming and props. Ivan Fischer’s Figaro at the Festival Theatre tomorrow has a tough act to follow.