It has been a week of beloved revivals at the Royal Opera House. Jonathan Miller’s contemporary Cosi is currently playing alongside Robert Lepage’s Rake’s Progress – an apt pairing of works that reflects an increasing attempt on the part of the Royal Opera to rival the consistently intelligent programming of Ed Gardner down the road at ENO.

In exploring Hogarth’s famous images and returning to the timeless story of the Rake, Stravinsky also returned one last time to the neoclassical structure and ‘number’ style he debuted so successfully in his ballet Pulcinella in 1920. A term he rejected vigorously, neoclassicism nevertheless accounts for the debt that Rake’s score owes to musical history, and particularly to Mozart’s Cosi, whose orchestration his opera mirrors exactly.

Robert Lepage’s production – set in the Hollywood of the 1950s, the period of the opera’s composition – is beautiful and innovative to look at, full of clever visual jokes and gestures; yet I was struck once again in revival at the slightly jarring effect of recontextualising an opera so rooted in place. Both Hogarth’s engravings and the Auden/Kallman libretto make much of their London setting – it is a move from the country to the city that precipitates the hero’s downfall, and its specific geography, from Gin Lane to Bedlam, that maps his demise. Thus when the curtain rises to reveal a vast American prairie landscape in the Hopper mode, complete with oil derrick and corn fields, it does require a perhaps unnecessary suspension of disbelief.

Conceptually however the transposition is an apt one, drawing parallels not only with the autobiographical context of the opera’s inception, but also with contemporary Hollywood where Tom Rakewells still rise and fall every day, surrounded by the same clamour of greed and venality. It is this hysterical atmosphere of novelty and ambition that Lepage’s production captures most effectively. Baba The Turk’s villa (complete with Hockney-esque swimming pool) is a visual homage to the films of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and Tom’s gloriously evanescent on-set trailer (it inflates from beneath the stage before floating off into the wings) is wittily contrived.

The cast list for this revival reads as decadently as a Nigella recipe – an absolute feast of top-flight singers. The fabulously versatile Patricia Bardon reprises her role as bearded lady Baba The Turk, combining her characteristic richness of tone with a charisma and sexual warmth that quite transcends her facial hair. Rosemary Joshua – a substitute for the originally advertised Kate Royal – brings a simultaneous maturity and fragility to the role of Tom’s faithful Anne Trulove, a role however that doesn’t fully exploit her dynamic soprano range.

At the core of the work is the partnership between Kyle Ketelsen’s sinister Nick Shadow and Toby Spence’s gloriously wide-eyed Tom Rakewell. Ketelsen’s Nick – part cinematic auteur, part Mephistopheles – was well judged, never quite slipping into the pantomime that lurks just at the edge of Stravinsky’s piece. His vocal performance was convincing, rich-toned and technically secure. The real delight of the evening however was Toby Spence. Capable of a lovely light English tenor sound, here he demonstrated a fullness and power of tone that saw him romp through Stravinsky’s edgier moments of melody-writing, gamely characterising them as he went. Perhaps most convincing in the Oklahoma-inspired youthful energy of the opening, his closing scenes in the asylum were some of the most touchingly rendered I have seen – making sense of an ending that can all too often appear sudden and disjointed.

The hottest sermon in town – this revived Rake has lost none of its decadent temptation, pleasing eyes and ears in equal measure.