Kát'a Kabanová, Janácek's harrowing examination of sexual guilt, has always tended to bring out the best in British opera companies. Few of its recent stagings, however, have so unflinchingly probed its moral and emotional complexities as Olivia Fuchs's exceptional new production for Opera Holland Park: this is the company's greatest achievement, and arguably Fuchs's as well.

She updates the work from the 1860s to the early years of the 20th century, locating Kát'a's tragedy within the wider context of the hypocrisies of a smugly affluent bourgeoisie. Kabanicha (Anne Mason) terrorises her family, but then plays S&M games with Dikoj (Richard Angas) when everyone's back is turned. The women who stare dismissively at Anne Sophie Duprels's Kát'a on her way back from church, and turn against her after her confession, are revealed to be comparably trapped in loveless marriages and yearning for freedom.

Duprels is wonderful in suggesting the depths of feeling beneath Kát'a's fragility. The emotional ferocity of her singing sometimes seems out of proportion to her slight frame. She cowers in terror before Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts's dangerous Tichon, and yields to Tom Randle's vulnerable, gloriously sung Boris with shy rapture. Fuchs presents their passion as capable of briefly transcending the forces of society and nature that will eventually pull them apart.

Their final catastrophic encounter, in which the gestures of desire can only trigger the bitterest of memories, have a veracity and emotional nakedness that is disturbing in the extreme. Stuart Stratford's conducting, lyrical yet violent, adds immeasurably to the intensity of it all.