Richard Bratby

Hockney’s Rake’s Progress remains one of the supreme achievements

But compared to Strauss’s Four Last Songs, Stravinsky’s opera, premièred a year later in 1951, feels as dated as peas in aspic

One production that nearly does send you out whistling the sets: Glyndebourne On Tour's revival of Hockney and Cox's Rake's Progress. [Image: © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Sisi Burn] 
issue 20 November 2021

With Glyndebourne’s The Rake’s Progress, the show starts with David Hockney’s front cloth. The colour, the ingenuity, the visual bravura: 46 years after this production’s first appearance in 1975, it’s still capable of halting you in your tracks. So drink it in. No blockbuster art exhibition will ever give you such ideal viewing conditions, or so much time with a single artwork. And no mock-up or faded video will ever be able to restore to Hockney’s sets and costumes the meaning and the impact that they possess when they’re peopled by living performers and accompanied by Stravinsky’s score. Come for the backdrops, stay for the opera. This is one revival that nearly does send you out whistling the scenery.

You’re certainly not going to be whistling the tunes. The Rake’s Progress is postwar Stravinsky, at the fag-end of his three-decade experiment with neoclassicism. The sudden jags of harpsichord, the laconic bassoon lines, the permanently raised eyebrow: by this stage in the game, there’s a tacit understanding that he’s well past even the illusion of sincerity.

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