OPERA / Lost beyond recall: Bayan Northcott on a revived Rake's Progress at Glyndebourne

Nineteen years on - how distant it now all seems] Stravinsky just five years gone and Auden, too; and in the homely little opera house, the crackling fanfare to The Rake's Progress launched by a still barely middle-aged Bernard Haitink conducting only his third opera. The delicious shock of the new when the curtain rose on sets and costumes cross-hatched in bright, coloured inks, as if copied from Hogarth by some precocious child. And out on the lawn at suppertime, the gathering of the David Hockney entourage, all peroxide and poses - a spectacle to rival anything in the production.

It is ironic that an opera which constantly questions the possibility of returning to the past - at least in this temporal life - should have become the oldest staging in the Glyndebourne schedule. In the new theatre, of course, it cannot be quite the same. Hockney has had to slightly enlarge his set designs to take account of a wider proscenium arch and John Cox has altered a number of nuances in his production, adding, unless memory deceives, a strikingly sacrilegious tableau at the end of the brothel scene.

The cast, too, is all fresh and mostly young - with several making Glyndebourne debuts. In the notoriously extended and high-

lying title role, the American tenor Stephen O'Mara makes a slightly blustering initial impression, but later reveals a finely focused line. The German soprano Christiane Oelze, as Anne Trulove, is sweetness personified, but could do with a touch more steel both in character and enunciation. Jane Henschel is an effusive if somewhat gusty Baba the Turk; Robert Tear's rubicund Sellem cannot quite efface the classic timing of John Fryatt, otherwise employed this Glyndebourne season. But the production is dominated by the magnificently sinister Nick Shadow of Steven Page, blackly sardonic, sonorous, every word projected.

No doubt some members of the eternal London Philharmonic remain as of 1975. But the conductor is now Andrew Davis, nicely balancing crispness of articulation and intricate lyricism of line in the earlier scenes; then a little losing grip in a score which, for all its 147-minute length, is composed with a split-second economy of timing. In particular, the Act 2 trio between Anne, Tom and Baba, and Nick Shadow's final blast as he sinks back to Hell, seem to lack weight in marginally too hasty tempi (and points were lost in a hectic auction scene, too). But the variable degree of immediacy in the sound-balance between winds and strings from different parts of the pit - at least as heard from the back of the stalls - hardly helped.

One other matter. The Rake's Progress was originally conceived in three acts, but Stravinsky came to prefer a two-act division with the first half culminating in the grand saraband of Act 2 scene 2 - and so did Glyndebourne in 1975. This time round, though, Act 2 scene 3 has been added on, with its far less effective curtain. Here, surely, a return to the past would be justified - even if that past, paradoxically, comprised Stravinsky's second thoughts.

In rep to 14 Aug, Glyndebourne, nr Lewes, East Sussex (0273 813813)