Phyllida Lloyd has done some of her best opera work in Leeds — her landmark staging of Britten’s once despised Gloriana, with Josephine Barstow as Elizabeth I, stands out — but nothing I have seen of the Mamma Mia! director’s work in the lyric theatre prepared me for the poleaxing impact of her new Peter Grimes. It is her most distinguished operatic achievement to date, and unquestionably the most thrilling evening I have spent in the opera house all year.

For Opera North, it is also a vindication of Richard Farnes’s appointment as music director and the company’s commitment to the ensemble ethic. Opera doesn’t come more harrowing than Peter Grimes, and I’m hard-pressed to think of a staging in which its message has come across the footlights so pitilessly, yet with such profound and stirring humanity.

Lloyd makes theatrical capital from austerity. Anthony Ward’s “sets” are essentially a bare stage with a backdrop suggesting a grey seascape. A few black wooden pallets and boxes, and a huge fishing net, erected like a marquee across the entire width of the stage, serve as props and scenery; and there is an exhilarating “imaginary” episode to the music of the Passacaglia, in which Grimes imagines his neighbours helping him to build not a hut, but a landing platform to launch his boat. (The second apprentice falls from this not into the briny deep, but a “sea” of increasingly hostile fisherfolk.) This Grimes throws the spotlight on bigoted villagers and their relationship with the protagonist, a burly, inarticulate visionary whose rough handling of two workhouse boys results in their accidental deaths and a community bent on retribution. The manhunt has never seemed more terrifying, as the chorus bay for their prey’s blood, and Lloyd shows them dismembering the oddball “outsider” in effigy, like Maenads in a Bacchanalian frenzy. It is one of the triumphs of Lloyd’s interpretation that she makes it resonate as a here-and-now tragedy: we are not far removed from the paedophile witch-hunts of Britain today, even though Grimes’s “crimes” are cruelty and negligence.

Until now, I hadn’t thought of Peter Grimes as an opera with an overtly Christian message, but Lloyd insinuates otherwise. The scene outside the church is represented with a simple wooden (life-size) crucifix and the congregation with its back to the audience. Later, Grimes’s effigy is hoisted aloft on the crucifix before it is dismembered — the hypocrisy of the self-righteous is devastatingly exposed here.

More than in any other recent production, Grimes’s relationship with Ellen Orford is lovingly expressed.

Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts’s brutish-looking Grimes may be a misfit, but he is a man with a conscience and a poetic sense of his own tragedy. Towards the end of the Passacaglia, Grimes sees an apparition of the first apprentice’s ghost, while during the Moonlight prelude — the opera’s emotional heart — we see him raising the dead John’s body and committing it to the deep with a heart-rending sob. It’s at such moments that you realise Grimes has nowhere to retreat except into madness. Lloyd’s imaginative stage pictures are simply unforgettable.

The musical impact of the performance is no less shattering, thanks to Farnes’s revelatory conducting, the wonderful playing of Opera North’s orchestra and choral singing that pins you to your seat. It’s good to be reminded that Britten wrote Grimes for a medium-sized theatre such as the Leeds Grand — it was premiered at Sadler’s Wells Opera 61 years ago, and will make a triumphant return there in this staging at the end of the month.

Opera North fields an excellent cast: Lloyd-Roberts grows in stature through the performance, Giselle Allen is an unusually youthful, touching and delicately sung Ellen, while Christopher Purves’s sympathetic but tough Balstrode could hardly be bettered. With Richard Angas (a girl- groping Mayor Swallow), Yvonne Howard (a Cynthia Payne-esque Auntie), Alan Oke (a pervily fanatical Bob Boles), Roderick Williams (a louche Ned Keene) and Nigel Robson (an amiable, uncomprehending Rev Adams), most of the small parts are luxuriously cast, but this Peter Grimes is a collective company triumph, the operatic event of the year.

The Anna Netrebko/Rolando Villazon road show made a belated London debut on Tuesday to a packed and noisily delighted Barbican Hall. With the Royal Philharmonic apparently happy to let its hair down in an evening of operatic excerpts under the expert and stylish baton of Emmanuel Villaume, this wasn’t the programme of potboilers one might have expected from these two increasingly popular young stars.

Duets from Massenet’s Manon, Tchaikovsky’s rarity Iolanta, a passionate love declaration from a Spanish zarzuela, Tonight from Bernstein’s West Side Story: all demonstrated a willingness to experiment with the operatic- concert format. Netrebko’s big, bright and beautiful soprano seems in danger of outgrowing Villazon’s dark lyric tenor, as well as some of the solo repertoire she sings. But this is an exciting pairing, genuine opera stars who may not be unfailingly idiomatic in all musical styles, but who look more convincing as young romantic lovers than any soprano-tenor “dream team” I can think of, and they give their all in expressing their emotions, vocally and with electrifying body language. I can’t wait to see them on stage together at Covent Garden.