Richard Morrison at Grange Park, Hampshire [Times Online, 4 June 2007]

It’s hard to warm to an opera in which there isn’t one likeable character and the music’s not very pretty either. So the odds are stacked against The Gambler, the Dostoevsky adaptation that Prokofiev wrote in his wild enfant-terrible days, before Stalin clamped his avant-garde tendencies and forced him to write tunes.