Among the many influences that fuelled Hugo von Hofmannsthal's libretto for Der Rosenkavalier were the engravings of William Hogarth. This is a fact ignored by most directors, who swamp Strauss's comedy in rococo frippery or nostalgic extravagance - although it's not lost, it would seem, on David McVicar, whose outstanding staging for Scottish Opera has the sharpness of focus and underlying bitterness of vision that characterise the English painter's work.
Getting shot of every stylistic cliche that has dogged the opera, McVicar brings it a drastic clarity, forcing a reappraisal of its content. Most of us see Der Rosenkavalier as being primarily a study of the corrosive influence of time on human relationships. McVicar reminds us, however, that the opera's 18th-century setting is also the springboard for an examination of social change, as the moral values of a declining aristocracy gradually give way to the contradicting standards of an emerging bourgeoisie.
McVicar forcefully explores the ambivalences inherent in both sets of values. Liberal aristocratic codes of sexual behaviour permit the Marschallin to pursue her affair with Octavian under the knowing eyes of her servants and to trade indiscreet erotic banter with Ochs, although the same codes also sanction Ochs's violent, abusive promiscuity. Faninal, meanwhile, is a parvenu ogre, who proclaims the sanctity of wedlock while bullying his daughter into compliance. Marriage, throughout, is equated with constraint. The Marschallin relinquishes Octavian not just to Sophie, but to middle-class coupledom, as the candles of McVicar's set gutter and darkness falls.
The casting is exemplary, dominated by Joan Rodgers's sad, haunting Marschallin - the finest performance of her career - and by Manfred Hemm's Ochs, younger, sexier and therefore infinitely more dangerous than most. Henriette Bonde-Hansen is the rapturous, waif-like Sophie opposite Stella Doufexis's handsome, unusually stroppy Octavian. Andrew Slater's Faninal is genuinely foul, as he should be.
Richard Armstrong's conducting has a nervous, edgy quality that seems to clutch at time itself as it ebbs relentlessly away, and the playing is to die for, although there are times when you wish the Scottish Opera Orchestra had a slightly larger quota of strings.
The whole is the finest Rosenkavalier I've seen in the UK. I can think of only one production elsewhere - the late Götz Friedrich's 1993 Berlin staging - that surpasses it. It's on tour until the end of April. You have to see it.
· In rep until March 23. Box office: 0141 332 9000.
