‘What we want is proper comedy!’ bellows the male chorus in the opening seconds of Prokofiev’s L’amour des trois oranges – in this case, a bevy of Monty Python bruisers in nylon frocks. The audience stirs. We’re being invaded by outsize schoolkids and what looks like a Scandinavian Eurovision entry, pushing through the stalls to the roars and whoops of a more-than-up-for-it student crowd. The previous night, I’d had four hours of manicured Handel and now a solo trombone was blowing raspberries in my face. ‘Stuff your tragedy! Take us out of ourselves!’ Yes, please! Do that. After prolonged exposure to da capo arias, a blast of raucous, multicoloured nonsense felt like shock therapy.

And Mark Burns’s staging at the Royal Northern College of Music really was funny; the genuine snorting-despite-yourself article. It’s an extraordinary score, composed in 1921 as the last jewelled shards of the Russian fairytale tradition were being fed into the modernist shredder and a young composer could make a reputation simply by writing for a huge orchestra and going a bit dada with the dissonance. Scriabin-ish whole tone harmonies smoulder in the wreckage as ostinatos bustle and squeal; early audiences naturally assumed that Prokofiev was a Bolshevik. ‘All........

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