The skeleton, which the entering audience sees painted on the curtain leaves no doubt that, in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, someone comes to A Bad End. In David McVicar's production for Scottish Opera, we can be sure that the Bad End is, at least stylish and meticulous. From the opening in Trulove's garden, its sylvan back-cloth replicated in the bower where Tom (Edgaras Montvidas) and Anne (Carolyn Sampson) canoodle vocally, it romps along.

The brothel scene - all pink and full of detailed movement choreographed by Andrew George - clearly has Tom a bit discombobulated. And that is an endearing aspect of the characterisation. He may be a rake, but he is no Lovelace. If anything, he and his love Anne are a tad wet. His seduction by Mother Goose (Karen Murray) who engulfs him in billows of pink net, is a product of his passivity.

It is this inaction that makes him such a perfect target for Nick Shadow, a deliciously urbane Steven Page, who commands the stage whenever he appears. The skeleton on the curtain turns out to be that of Tom's deceased and long-lost uncle, whose tale is dramatised by Nick in the bower turned puppet theatre, a directorial bent further displayed when Nick persuades a jaded Tom to marry the bearded Baba the Turk, for no better reason than he can.

Leah-Marian Jones, as Baba, enjoys perhaps the most complex character. Her supercilious arrival in sedan chair to her new matrimonial home is succeeded with the housewife chattering over breakfast in what she has turned into a cabinet of curiosities, and finally with her withdrawal from Tom's life and return to the stage. This occurs on Tom's bankruptcy, when the contents of the house are sold by auctioneer Sellem, a wonderfully foppish and affected Colin Judson in towering wig who almost steals the show.

There is irony in this production of Stravinsky's homage to baroque opera being truer to the style than most stagings of the originals. The classy designs of John Macfarlane and the lighting of David Finn add layers of atmosphere. The singing and the orchestral playing conducted by Sian Edwards catch the baroque forms and trills, and their subversions. Although there are moments when Montvidas and Sampson are almost overwhelmed by the orchestra, their singing is stylish and characterful.

Neither does McVicar shy away from the echoes of Don Giovanni, when Nick Shadow claims - after a year and a day - his wages, no less than the soul of Tom. But even a devil can be too clever for his own good, and the game of chance which offers Tom a release is won because, at bottom, he is no Lovelace, and really does love Anne.

Rewarded with insanity for cheating Nick of his victim, Tom lies in the madhouse convinced he is Adonis and waiting for his Venus, who arrives in the shape of Anne. Their duet oozes poignancy, amplified when she sings him to sleep. Her father Trulove (Graeme Broadbent) who has watched the sadly inevitable tale unfold, takes her away before the end.

Then, there is the jolly moral, where lights go up and the chorus and all the characters sing straight to the audience, sending us home with, in essence, a flea in our ear.