Conducted by Jakub Hrůša, Barrie Kosky’s modern-dress staging of Katya Kabanova caused a considerable stir in Salzburg last year. An angry, occasionally wayward interpretation of Janáček’s masterpiece, it was considered by some as very much the festival’s high point, while Corinne Winters’s performance in the title-role was widely regarded as fulfilling the potential many had observed in her work over the years, thereby marking her emergence as an artist of genuine greatness.

Kosky, confrontative as always, paradoxically uses the Felsenreitschule’s wide, open spaces to suggest isolation and claustrophobia. The arcades are walled in, so the action takes place at the foot of what to all intents and purposes is a colossal, forbidding rock face. On stage, meanwhile, are row upon row of disquietingly lifelike dummies, in street clothes with their backs to the audience, a silent, uncaring majority from which the protagonists emerge and to which they return at various points only to be subsumed within it, except Katya, however, for whom there can be no place in this normative crowd after she has effectively rebelled against it.

Within this framework, Kosky adopts a sparse approach that is sometimes startling, sometimes reductive. The image of Winters running ecstatically across the vast stage, dwarfed by the rock face behind her, is unforgettable, as is the infinitely tender way she yields to David Butt Philip’s insistent Boris, when he quite literally sweeps her off her feet. Kosky is also chilling in his treatment of Evelyn Herlitzius’s terrifying Kabanicha and Jens Larsen’s abusive Dikoj, hypocritically involved in a sadomasochistic relationship (as has become fashionable with this work of late), though more explicitly portrayed here than in any other staging I know. Kosky, however, plays down the element of religious guilt that twists its way into Katya’s psyche. There’s no church for the characters to hide in during the (I’m afraid) oddly unconvincing storm, only a group of faceless people walking aimlessly to and fro, though Katya’s confession becomes an attack on those round her as Winters snatches Herlitzius’s walking stick and flails with it at her tormentors before being restrained by Jaroslav Březina’s desperate Tichon.

Winters is utterly remarkable throughout, words and gestures always telling, emotions barely contained within a steady stream of glorious tone, unsparing in the way she digs deep into the raptures and anguish that war within Katya’s soul. This really is one of the great performances of the title-role, very much the equal of Elisabeth Söderström on Charles Mackerras’s groundbreaking Decca recording (10/77) or Karita Mattila in Robert Carsen’s Madrid staging conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek (FRA Musica, 4/11), the principal rival on DVD, though Hrůša and Winters have the stronger supporting cast.

Butt Philip’s lyrical ardour as Boris is tellingly undermined by the moments of hesitancy that betray the man’s catastrophic weakness of will. Herlitzius is all steely implacability, terrorising Březina’s unusually sympathetic Tichon and treating Larsen’s foul-tempered Dikoj with sadistic contempt. Benjamin Hulett and Jarmila Balážová make a spirited and touching pair as Kudrjáš and Varvara, their scenes together beautifully done. Hrůša, meanwhile, is wonderful in this work, superbly judging its mixture of lyricism and tension. Katya’s almost mystic childhood reminiscences of church sound ravishing, and a tremendous surge of eroticism takes your breath away when she and Boris finally meet in the garden scene. Elsewhere the terror and emotional violence are uncompromisingly realised, from the hammering monotones that close the first act to the visceral ferocity of the storm. Despite Kosky’s occasional idiosyncrasies. this is musically overwhelming. You really do need to hear it.