The fine soprano Amanda Roocroft, whose sensational performance as Desdemona for Welsh National Opera electrified local audiences three months ago, is wringing the withers once more as she returns to the title role in Janacek’s opera Jenufa. This is a welcome revival of David Alden’s double Oliver award-winning 2006 production for English National Opera, which shifts the action from a Moravian mill at the dawn of the 20th century to a Stalinist style industrial complex of some 50 years later.

Caddish bosses’s boy Steva (tenor Tom Randle), the cynosure of all the local lasses’ eyes, roars on to the scene in the saddle of a throbbing motorcycle, and soon gathers an enthusiastic bunch of admirers around him. He assures fidelity to Jenufa, who is secretly expecting his baby, but we suspect that his promise to wed her is worthless. So it proves. After her long-time admirer, his half-brother Laca (Robert Brubaker), has damaged her looks in an unpleasant jealous attack with a knife, he rejects her and, later, her baby too.

The focus of the drama then shifts to Jenufa’s stepmother, Kostelnicka Buryja, in which role the American dramatic mezzo Michaela Martens makes a powerful European debut in this production. Having hidden the pregnancy and birth to save the family name, she drugs Jenufa and murders the baby boy by placing him into an icy stream. The discovery of his corpse, on the day of Jenufa’s wedding to the faithful Laka, is an operatic moment as intensely dramatic as the trumpet blast in Fidelio or the Duke’s reprise of La donna è mobile in Rigoletto. It is superbly handled here, with conductor Eivind Gullberg Jensen in sure command of ENO’s impressive musical forces.

This is a production that does full justice to one of the great works of 20th-century opera. Besides those already mentioned, there is fine vocal work as Grandmother Buryja by Susan Gorton, who has shone in the role for many years with WNO, and an amusing acting performance from Susanna Tudor-Thomas as the Mrs Merton lookalike Mayor’s wife. There are further performances tonight and Saturday. Box office tel 0871 911 0200 (www.eno.org).