It is a long way from the raucous eighteenth-century London of William Hogarth to the rarefied post-Second World War Hollywood Hills where Igor Stravinsky made his home, but they are joined by the scatty rich boy who comes a cropper in Hogarth’s 1732 tale in eight paintings, “A Rake’s Progress”, and who was then rewritten by the Russian exile as opera for the mid-20th century. It’s one of very few post-1945 operas to have found a steady-ish place in the repertoire, and is, unusually, about to pop up twice here, at Bury Court in Hampshire from 6 to 14 March and the Royal Academy of Music in London from 12 to 17 March. The England of Hogarth’s time had no real artistic institutions – the Royal Academy of Arts was founded in 1768 – and the cult