The Rake’s Progress

New Opera SingaporeVictoria TheatreSep 6, 7.30pm

Stravinsky’s only opera is one of the cleverest operas around, mixing pastiches of everyone from Monteverdi to Verdi into a tale about a newly rich fop who goes mad after succumbing to the gospel of hedonistic self-actualisation.

Its rather uncharitable view of humanity has a moral austerity oddly resonant in Singapore: a seemingly uncomplicated nostalgia for bourgeois family values; a suspicion of unlicensed desire as fatally dangerous; a judgment on individual gratification as a dereliction of duty.

The deus ex machina comes in the form of a rich and recently deceased uncle who bestows Tom Rakewell (the titular rake) his fortune. The complacent sermonising of the characters following Tom’s downfall is the last click in the gears of the opera’s moralistic machinery – a pat closure enacted in miniature by the deft neo-Popean rhyming couplets that pepper every page of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman’s extraordinary libretto.

New Opera’s dashing staging of the opera on Sept 6 skillfully captured the fascination of these contradictions: warmly performed despite the neoclassical detachment of the score and its characters, with a sense of irony just the right side of ridiculous, as when Baba the Turk marches victoriously into the sunset in Act 3.

The orchestra played delightfully, with Chan Wei Shing’s elegant, energetic conducting making the most of the score’s genre-bending wit, such as the invocation of Monteverdi’s Orfeo at the outset or the glances at “Soave sia il vento” from Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte in Mother Goose’s brothel.

Korean tenor Philipp Heo’s Tom had superb presence, flair and some truly impressive vocal technique (if also some slightly unidiomatic pron...