The great glory of this new staging of Wozzeck is the fantastic playing of the ENO Orchestra and the focussed, perceptive conducting of Edward Gardner. He keeps a tight rein on this complex and rigorous score, investing it with passion, clarity, and tremendous crescendos and fortissimos to reveal Berg's humanity and post-Mahlerian expression.

Wozzeck as an opera may not be quite the equal of Lulu (whether unfinished or completed by others) but it is a compelling story, and magnificent music, and keeps it hold on audiences. Certainly here, aided by Richard Stokes's English translation, for Carrie Cracknell has come up with a concept at-war soldiers, dead soldiers' coffins draped in the Union Flag, and the trauma of warfare and its aftermath.

Tom Scutt's design is compartmentalised and multi-tiered, including a bed-sit for Marie, the mother of Wozzeck's child out of wedlock, for which she is taunted, and where the Drum Major finds sexual gratification. There are rooms for Wozzeck's wheelchair-bound friend Andres, a garden shed by the looks of things, and for Army personnel, and a club for conviviality and partying, all the more shallow when death is the air, but what the top layer of urinals serves must be mused on at one's convenience, for this area is unpopulated and unused. One can quibble with Cracknell for not matching set with libretto at times, or for being too obvious at times, but it's an assured and imaginative operatic debut.

Apart from Gardner's mastery of the score, and the ENO Orchestra giving its all, the cast includes Leigh Melrose as a robotic and murderous Wozzeck, Tom Randle as an agitated Captain, and James Morris as a drug-dealing Doctor; Morris, a famous Wotan of course, was magnificent in stage presence and vocal assurance. Also outstanding was Sara Jakubiak as Marie, vulnerable, self-loathing, realistic, a nice girl who should be somewhere else. Marie and Wozzeck's ever-fractious relationship is tangible and made real by the singers. He becomes more and unhinged, hallucinating, she more and more scared. By the end, both are dead, the walls run with blood, and their son is left alone, prominently positioned on the stage.

This is compelling drama, violent and poignant, underpinned and illuminated by great music, marvellously performed.