Performing Arts

Stravinsky

AThe Rake's Progress. Claycomb, Kennedy, Shimell, Peckova, Symphony Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie, Brussels, Ono (OpusArte, two DVDs)

Premiered in 1951, The Rake's Progress is one of the most brilliant operatic creations of the 20th century. It's a loss-of-innocence parable told in a sassy libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. And it's clothed in some of Stravinsky's wittiest neoclassical music, complete with wrong-notey parodies of 18th-century harpsichord continuo.

Tom Rakewell is a nice but lazy young man who wants to marry the sweet Anne Trulove. The mysterious Nick Shadow awards Tom riches and power but also leads him on a downward slope of selfishness and debauchery. In the end, Tom just barely evades the Faustian sacrifice of his soul, but Nick takes revenge by making him go mad.

When the curtain rises on this Brussels production, you may think there's been a mix-up with Oklahoma! The setting is a wide-open field, with an oil rig slowly bobbing away. But director Robert Lepage and designers Carl Fillion and Boris Firquet have cleverly updated the opera's 18th-century English setting to 1950s America; the visuals are a play on postwar illusions.

It actually works, brilliantly. Mother Goose's brothel becomes a movie-set Wild West saloon, with Nick as a director on a camera boom.

Tom's house is a little inflatable streamlined trailer on a movie lot.

Anne confronts Tom after his marriage to the bearded lady Baba the Turk in front of a movie theater. The moneymaking invention that turns stones into bread is – you guessed it – a television set.

These sets must have cost a fortune. (That's what major government arts subsidies will do for you.) And the cast would be hard to beat anywhere.

Laura Claycomb, a Southern Methodist University alum, is an irresistible, radiant-voiced Anne, and Andrew Kennedy, with an easy lyric tenor, perfectly portrays Tom's disintegration. William Shimell is just sinister enough as Nick, with an aptly firm-edged baritone. Dagmar Peckova is a deliciously hyper Baba the Turk, with a great foghorn chest voice.

Conductor Kazushi Ono gets spruce playing from the La Monnaie orchestra. Video and audio quality are very good, although the orchestra sometimes has more presence than the singers. Extras include an interview with Mr. Lepage and glimpses behind the scenes.