A splinter of glass shatters the sunlight, and a huddle of villagers leaps through the window. A bride is blessed and a baby drowned below the ice. Jenufa, part of Glyndebourne’s Janácek trilogy originally created by Nikolaus Lehnhoff and Tobias Hoheisel and now in its fourth revival, is faithfully and searingly staged by Daniel Dooner for Glyndebourne on Tour. And no one, from Norwich to Plymouth, should miss it.

This is Janácek without the intrusion of concept, without the obsession of image, without any agenda other than that of propelling the audience into the heart of the opera’s pain and compassion. The dark silhouetted mountains, the sickly green light in the teal-blue room, the blinding morning light of a wedding in which the bride wears black — all this is brought to life in a visceral account of the score from young Robin Ticciati. It’s his last season with Glyndebourne on Tour, and his first Jenufa. And he is clearly immensely excited by the muscular momentum and the tense, troubling detail of Janácek’s music.

And so are we. With the red timber, the intense blue of the interiors and the oppressive weight of the judgmental generations of family and community, this is a Strindbergian world we inhabit, with characters living on the edge. At first Giselle Allen, making her house debut as Jenufa, seems just too fragile. But, thrillingly, we watch her grow, slowly and compellingly, in vocal and inner strength, to find a spiritual energy for her final forgiveness.

Glyndebourne casts a real Czech tenor as Steva: Pavel Cernoch sings with polish and also a deep ache of anguish in the top of his register. His voice is counterpointed with the raw, coiled anger and eventual nobility within the tenor of Peter Wedd’s Laca. But the real triumph of this production, so richly animated with folkdance and song, is the intense emotional dysfunctionality of Anne Mason’s magnificent Kostelnicka. Minutely thought through, it rejects the black ramrod caricature for a multidimensional study of human pain and fear. And Mason’s mezzo, always beautifully nourished and preserved, expresses this completely with a fierce strength and revelatory insight.

New Victoria Theatre, Woking (0844 871 7645), to Nov 7. Then touring to Dec 5

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