Dazzling Sophie

When a new opera arrives freighted with past celebrity in other forms - William Styron's 1979 novel, Sophie's Choice became a film starring Meryl Streep - the audience is not innocent. This affects response to Nicholas Maw's vast new work commissioned by Covent Garden and Radio 3. Having missed the film, I was at least free from cinematic expectation or Streepish association. After a volley of pre-publicity and a line-up that includes Simon Rattle and Trevor Nunn, the work was given its best shot. Did it succeed?

At more than four hours, it makes huge demands on performer and listener alike.

Nunn, with menacingly angular, swiftly changing sets by Rob Howell, has dispatched an expensive, slick production. Rattle's tireless dedication and subtlety in the pit were matched by expert orchestral playing, notably in the conspicuously busy woodwind. The cast, too, led by the dazzling Austrian mezzo Angelika Kirchschlager as the Polish exile of the title and American baritone Rodney Gilfry as her insane lover Nathan, excelled.

The composer has reduced Styron's narrative, with its complex time structure and delicate balance of wit and tragedy, into a clear libretto, heavy on words but light on lightness. His lush, melodic, at times unvaryingly fluent music coloured by Bartok, Strauss and the English tradition, and a vocal line within aural reach of the spoken voice, should satisfy those nervous of a more violent sound world typified by Harrison Birtwistle. This is not music to shock.

A narrator (Dale Duesing, heroically on stage throughout) looks back at his younger self (Stingo, a vivid Gordon Gietz) and his relationship with Sophie and Nathan. The scenes between the three friends provided a much-needed scherzo to the necessary lugubriousness elsewhere. In a series of flashbacks, Sophie's horrific past and the death of her children unfolds. Here, mawkishness threatened. A scene between Sophie and the Auschwitz Commandant invited dangerous comparisons with Wozzeck. Holocaust imagery as literal as the sidedrum's ghostly mimicry of a rattle of flanged wheel on rail joint confined the resonance of Styron's work to a circumstantial past instead of exploring what he calls the "ecumenical nature of evil".

Between the radiant opening E major chord and its almost inaudible dissonant transfiguration with which the piece disappears, Maw has made an ambitious edifice. Most good operas have been radically revised after their first trial by audience. Sophie's Choice will be better for rigorous tightening and trimming. Emily Dickinson's frugal verse occasions some of the evening's best moments. Maw could put Dickinson's scissors to good use.