Updating the setting of an opera is always a gamble: will the relocation reveal more than it obscures? Robert Lepage's production of Stravinsky's Rake's Progress (which originated at La Monnaie, Brussels, and is shared with three other houses but is new to Covent Garden) boasts such an ingenious conceit as to annihilate quibbles.

The progress of the rake in the scenario devised by Auden and Kallman for Stravinsky is a Hogarthian one from country house to fashionable Georgian London to Bedlam. In Lepage's version, Tom, the rake, is transformed by the diabolic Nick Shadow into a Hollywood star.

The machine of which Tom dreams, capable of miracles for the betterment of mankind, turns out to be an early television set (doubling as a bread machine). When the glitter fades and Tom is bankrupted by his speculative enterprise, he is confronted by Shadow in a Vegas-style Last Chance Saloon.

The parallels are perfect and in terms of the themes of corruption by celebrity, rampant speculation and infidelity, the moral is arguably more clearly drawn than in the original scenario. Certainly Lepage, creating the production with Ex Machina of Quebec, brings out the resonances of the American domiciles of Stravinsky (who was obsessed by the new medium of the television, wishing to write an opera for it), Auden and Kallman, and very wittily he does it, too.

No less of an achievement is the way the production taps the vein of melancholy that provides the work's undertow. In this Lepage is aided by the marvellously empathetic conducting of Thomas Adès, who consistently finds the tender, elegiac quality too often absent in readings of this brilliant neoclassical pastiche.

Adès, too, is fortunate to have a terrific cast. Charles Castronovo's Tom Rakewell has a Handelian's command of tonal nuance, while Sally Matthews soars ecstatically as his devoted Anne Trulove. Their final scene in the asylum is deeply poignant.

John Relyea contributes a splendidly villainous Nick Shadow, Patricia Bardon a colourful Baba the Turk and Darren Jeffrey a sterling Trulove. Both dramatically and musically this is a genuinely revelatory Rake.

Until 18 July. Information: 020 7304 4000, www.roh.org.uk.