Susanna Mälkki, first heard at the Metropolitan Opera leading L’Amour de Loin by her compatriot Kaija Saariaho, returns with Stravinsky’s tart neoclassical pastiche The Rake’s Progress, adapted by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman from paintings by William Hogarth. The rake of the title, a naïf led astray by bright, shiny things (read: money), was originally sung in Venice by Robert Rounseville, the personable and sweet-voiced tenor who was shortly to star on Broadway as Leonard Bernstein’s first Candide. In the current Met revival, Ben Bliss leads the cast, opposite Golda Schulz as Anne Trulove, whose luminous faith proves powerless to redeem him. Christian Van Horn is Nick Shadow, who brings Tom low. Alice Coote has the camp part as Baba, the bearded Turkish lady from the circus, whom Tom briefly marries on a whim. The production is a good one, by Jonathan Miller. —Matthew Gurewitsch