In this revival of the co-production for Welsh and English National Operas of Handel's final oratorio, Jephtha, WNO has again emerged with the greater success.

At its premiere in 2003 in Cardiff's New Theatre, the dramatic truth of Handel's music was honoured with such intensity that director Katie Mitchell's staging was able to sustain its own particular logic. While it could not hope to recapture the totality of the experience in that more intimate space, WNO's performance at the Millenium Centre retained all the tight emotional focus lost in the translation to London's Coliseum last year.

The discipline Donald Nally has brought to the WNO chorus was also evident as he made his conducting debut. When chosen to lead the Israelites against the Ammonites, Jephtha vows to make a sacrifice if victory is his. In the hour of triumph, he is broken by the realisation that it is his daughter Iphis who must be executed.

In the Old Testament story, she dies, but Handel and his librettist Thomas Morell decided to have an angel save her. Mitchell goes a step further and makes the winged angel a complicit presence. Her intervention is not enough to dispel the sense of tragedy, though, and it is not the political intrigue - Mitchell moves the piece to somewhere in mid-20th century wartorn Europe - but the cost to the chosen first family that counts, as Susan Bickley's tortured Storge reveals.

Mark Padmore's Jephtha remains a fine study of power and vulnerability, with his henchman, Zehul, well calculated by Neal Davies. Yet it was soprano Fflur Wyn and counter-tenor Iestyn Davies that made the love of Iphis and her betrothed Hamor so involving. Their beautifully articulated and affecting singing spelled heartbreak by the end.

· At the Birmingham Hippodrome (0870 730 1234) on March 16, then touring.