As the music starts, blood drips down the back wall of an abstract, prison-like set. When the music gets more agitated, a “chorus” of black-clad dancers scrawl the names of Agamemnon, Iphigenia and Clytaemnestra in chalk, then reenact the sacrifice of Iphigenia by Agamemnon and the slaughter of the king of Mycenae by his vengeful queen. Gluck’s tragédie of 1779, Iphigénie en Tauride, one of the supreme masterpieces of neoclassical opera has returned to the repertoire of the Royal Opera for the first time in 34 years, in a relentlessly dark, physical and emotionally harrowing staging by Robert Carsen. Already seen in Chicago and San Francisco, it stars the Iphigenia de nos jours, the American mezzo-soprano Susan Graham.

A neglected rarity until quite recently, the piece is a powerful drama of family blood guilt, revenge and atonement. The Mycenaean princess is spirited away to a barbarian land (Tauris), where she is forced to serve as a priestess sacrificing human lives. Her brother, Orestes, pursued by the furies for the terrible crime of killing his mother, Clytaemnestra, is shipwrecked with his friend Pylades off the coast of Tauris. Captured by Tauris’s paranoid king, Thoas – an oracle has foretold his death at the hands of a stranger – Orestes and Pylades must be sacrificed by Iphigenia, but a strange feeling of empathy stays her hand. Unaware of their kinship, Iphigenia questions Orestes about the deaths of her parents, which he explains without revealing himself. Only when he is on the sacrificial altar do they recognise each other. Thoas is killed in the ensuing battle, and the goddess Diana appears, declaring that Orestes has atoned for his crime; she commands an end to the bloodshed and the return of Orestes to Mycenae as king.

Gluck clothes Euripides’s drama in a score of wrenching emotional intensity and spellbinding beauty. From the almost Wagnerian prelude, beginning with magical serenity before erupting into a turbulent orchestral storm scene, Gluck never allows the tension to slacken in one of the most tautly constructed, economical music-dramas of the 18th century. The perceived austerity of Iphigénie has undoubtedly kept it from taking its rightful place at the centre of the modern operatic repertory, though it has been rescued from near oblivion by outstanding dramatic sopranos and mezzos such as Maria Callas, Régine Crespin and Rita Gorr.

Graham is the latest world-class singer to stake a claim to Gluck’s distraught, majestic heroine. In Carsen’s bare, minimalist staging, designed by Tobias Hoheisel, she certainly looks the part: tall and charismatic, even though dressed in uniform black she towers over everyone else on stage, effortlessly dominant. Vocally, she may lack the blade-like penetration of a Callas or the linguistic incisiveness of a Crespin, but her long experience in Mozart and her more recent forays into Berlioz’s Dido find a meeting place in her classically poised singing of Iphigenia. Her championship has restored the fortunes of this wonderful opera, and we should all be grateful to her.

In London, Graham is pitted against the athletic, charismatic Orestes of Simon Keenlyside, a huge favourite with the public here, who delivers powerfully, if not in his freshest voice, his nightmarish vision of Clytaemnestra’s ghost returning to haunt him. Both he and Paul Groves, a lyrical Pylades, gained lustre throughout the evening. Clive Bayley, as Thoas – an ungrateful role, hard to cast – sounded less than comfortable with the higher notes of the bass-baritone register, but the small roles were luxuriously cast, with Cécile van de Sant (Diana), Gail Pearson (Greek woman), Jacques Imbrailo (Scythian) and Krzysztof Szumanski (minister).

We are fortunate that Covent Garden, unlike San Francisco and Chicago, can field a period-instrument pit band, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, under Ivor Bolton, who proves a more persuasive Gluckist than he did a Mozartian in last season’s scrappy revival of Don Giovanni. Carsen’s production will clearly divide the public – there were a few boos amid the storm of bravos at the production team’s curtain call – but he makes a compelling case for the opera as a visceral and emotional contemporary music drama. I urge anyone unfamiliar with this astonishing work to give it a try.

The last fortnight of the BBC Proms brought a magnificent succession of top international orchestras from Lucerne, Bavaria, San Francisco, Vienna, Leipzig and Boston, but the Last Night belongs to the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Conducting his first Last Night, Jiri Belohlavek might have made a faltering speech, but he entered into the flag-waving spirit of the occasion. He was in his element, of course, in Dvorak’s Otello Overture and Fucik’s Entrance of the Gladiators. Belle of the ball was the soprano Anna Netrebko, in a shimmering silver frock, swooning and sighing as Bellini’s sleepwalking Amina, from La sonnambula, and flirting outrageously with members of the audience as she swirled around the podium, throwing roses at the Prommers, in Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiss (My lips kiss so hot), from Lehar’s Giuditta. She may not be the most idiomatic of singers in this repertory, but she has star quality to spare. Britannia may rule the waves, but, on the Last Night, Britons were enslaved by the pulchritudinous Russian.

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