Stravinsky’s ingenious toy

Is Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress anything more than an exercise in style? ‘I will lace each aria into a tight corset,’ Stravinsky told Nicolas Nabokov, and for most of three acts that’s pretty much what he does, deftly fitting W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman’s libretto to a steadily chugging parade of his smartest, pertest neoclassical tricks. The motor-rhythms, the acid harmonies, the borrowings from Mozart, Rossini and Handel: it’s all brilliantly accomplished and supremely knowing.

In small doses, it’s appetising enough, and even at full length there’s much to enjoy — especially when played with the relish that Sir Andrew Davis and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra brought to this concert performance. The Usher Hall acoustic couldn’t blur the sheer exuberance with which the SCO players brought out the primaries and pastels of Stravinsky’s score: whirring strings, blowsy trumpets and a pair of slithering, snorting bassoons who clearly felt the whole piece had been written as a double concerto just for them.