The 73rd annual Ojai Music Festival began June 6th with their first full-length opera production, Igor Stravinsky’s 1951 comic tragedy “The Rake’s Progress.” Inspired by Hogarth’s series of paintings and engravings of the same name, this is a fable about the downfall of one Tom Rakewell who unknowingly sells his soul to the Devil for riches and the high life in London, abandoning his country love interest Anne Trulove. The characters’ names are all part of the fun in the Libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman which has the gullible Tom marry a bearded lady, lose his fortune because of a lunatic scheme to make bread from stones (all courtesy of his mentor from hades, aka Nick Shadow), finally ending up in an asylum after he wins back his soul in a card game, dying alone. Conductor and 2019 Music Director Barbara Hannigan brought out the best of Stavinsky’s score which was played with verve and precision by Dutch chamber orchestra LUDWIG. The singers of Equilibrium Young Artists, Ms. Hannigan’s mentoring program, sang and acted beautifully, and the lighting and stage direction by Linus Fellbom, and Anna Ardelius’s costumes were the most sophisticated and fully realized I have seen for an OMF operatic production. Scenery consisted of a huge shipping box center stage which opened with a bang at the top of the show, the opened sides functionioning as the “stage” for the action throughout until closing up again at the end, only to reopen for the epilogue. This box, which made a long journey from Germany for a just-in-time arrival in Ojai, was the centerpiece image for this year’s festival theme of Out Of The Box, and also sums up the history of this adventurous music festival.
