Jonathan Miller's 1995 production of Così Fan Tutte has a habit of taking Mozart's most ambivalent comedy into different emotional territory with each successive appearance, and its latest outing, opening the Royal Opera's new season, gives us something more muted than we have experienced for a while.

Miller, overseeing the revival himself, has dispensed with the cynicism and some of the gimmickry that intruded on previous occasions. The dominant tone is now one of deep sadness. There's a strong sense of lives damaged not only by the machinations of others but by the potential for individual self-deception, and the ending is notably painful rather than judgmentally harsh. Mobile phone gags are less in evidence, too, though on the downside a rather coarse sexual humour has replaced genuine eroticism. It gets seriously in the way, above all during the scene in which Stéphane Degout's tellingly anxious Guglielmo seduces Jurgita Adamonyte's Dorabella.

Performance-wise, things are by no means plain sailing. Maria Bengtsson, an exquisite Fiordiligi at Berlin's Komische Oper in 2005, is less effective here, where her voice simply doesn't fill Covent Garden's bigger space, while Pavol Breslik's Ferrando, posing all over the place in the tightest jeans imaginable, teeters at times on the verge of camp. On the other hand, Thomas Allen's Alfonso and Rebecca Evans's Despina (less abrasive, and therefore more complex than before) are impeccable.

You might also find yourself in two minds about Thomas Hengelbrock's conducting: orchestrally this is wonderfully detailed and subtle, although Hengelbrock's deployment of jolting tempo changes feels overly mannered after a while.