A shocking success

Dense with musical riddles and ciphers though it is, Berg's Wozzeck shouts its desperate message direct to the heart of anyone willing to listen. No decoding of this early 20th-century masterpiece is required. The Royal Opera's unmissable new production, directed by Keith Warner and conducted by Antonio Pappano, has a special £50 top-price ticket scheme. Even after three-quarters of a century Wozzeck (premiered in 1925) is still considered "difficult" and audiences rashly stay away. If this bargain offer helps lure the tentative, the financial risk will be richly justified.

Yet the work's lyricism is instant and overwhelming, the impact still shocking even to an audience tempered by Tarantino and hardened by Damien Hirst - and despite the fact that Buchner, on whose play the opera is based, died in 1836. Wrong-note Viennese waltzes, on-stage band and popular songs give surface irony, while beneath Berg's own musical voice weeps and moans from every expressively layered section of the orchestra. Pappano, conducting a second new production in his inaugural season, drew variously luminous and fittingly raw playing from the orchestra.

You could wish for no finer staging or more impressive cast. Warner's gift is to tell a story, here made all the more intense by being played without an interval. Not that there is any mystery as to what is going on: Wozzeck, a soldier of dull-edged intelligence, subjects himself to sadistic mental and physical experiments to earn money for his lover Marie and child. But while the Doctor shoves a tube up him in anal colloquy, Marie is busy enjoying a more enjoyable kind of rear intercourse with the Drum Major, watched by the Lenin-like voyeur Doctor - a menacing, masterful Eric Halfvarson - and the child (nine year-old Jacob Moriarty, light as a leaf and discomfortingly haunting).

Stefanos Lazaridis and his design team mixed harsh reality - whitetiled laboratory, complete with green slime and glass specimen cases - with dark abstraction and surreal mirrored illusion. The fine German baritone Matthias Goerne, well known here as a recitalist but only now making his ROH debut, brought poetry and brawn to the title role, with the Swedish soprano Katarina Dalayman in the best sense sluttishly voluptuous as Marie. The final horrifying Houdini-like coup is alone worth the price of the ticket.

Wozzeck is showing at the Royal Opera House Until 31 October. Box office: 020 7304 4000.