Jonathan Miller's English National Opera production of Der Rosenkavalier updates Strauss's bittersweet masterpiece to the time of composition - that is, to the years immediately before the first world war. This might alarm those who prefer the opera in its more usual 18th-century setting. But Miller's transposition brings us face to face with the work's dark undertow, where its tragicomic, sexual configurations are formed and re-formed in a world in which time is running out - a fact of which the Marschallin is only too aware but the other characters remain oblivious.
Miller shrouds the opera in discreet images of social change and intimations of impending conflagration. A brash, emotionally restrictive bourgeoisie is invading aristocratic territory with its loose codes of sexual licence. In Faninal's hastily furnished mansion, naff, Tissot-like paintings burst from packing cases in marked contrast to the Marschallin's boudoir, where 17th-century erotica surrounds her bed. Diana Montague's military Octavian sweeps on to present Susan Gritton's gawky Sophie with the silver rose at the front of a parade of men in uniform who may soon be despatched to the trenches to die. Miller even hints at what lies beyond the catastrophe: the proto-fascist statues that cover the front of Faninal's house represent a premonition of the Austro-German bourgeoisie's post-war swerve to the far right. Miller reserves his final images for the servants and intriguers who form Vienna's proletarian underworld, aware that their time will come in its turn.
This is beautifully cast, wonderfully acted and gloriously sung. Janice Watson is exquisite as the Marschallin, a woman poised between youth and age, generating a sad yet dignified stillness on stage and breaking your heart in act one with her meditation on transience. Montague looks great in drag and sings Octavian's music with a tone that oozes sensuality, while Gritton floats Sophie's stratospheric lines with breathtaking rapture. John Tomlinson, in one of his finest performances, plays Ochs as Strauss intended, as a Falstaffian figure of unbreakable vitality rather than the more usual uncouth bumpkin. Conductor Vassily Sinaisky lingers over the score with great fondness, as if trying to capture its beauty before it, too, is dissolved by time. This is everything Rosenkavalier should be: a slow waltz on the edge of an abyss made all the more poignant by our knowledge that the world is facing the abyss once again.
· In rep until March 29. Box office: 020-7632-8300.
