The Royal Opera is back - and if this evening was anything to go by, back with a vengeance.

For what was partly a prequel to the opening of the restored Opera House, partly a commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war, it returned with the War Requiem. This is Britten's greatest score, a work that, in making an irrefutable case for pacifism, alternately mourns and condemns the horror at the centre of the century.

With the Royal Opera Orchestra playing with almost visceral intensity, Bernard Haitink steered the work into uncompromising emotional territory, sparing you little. This performance was as much about doubt as about faith, a cry of fury to a benevolent God who can seemingly permit atrocity to be perpetrated by His creation. Grief was leaden, omnipresent and inescapable at the beginning. Haitink even went so far as to present the superficial glitz of militarism in the jaunty opening fanfares of the Dies Irae, before the war machine swung into action with pulverising, horrific rigidity. The work finally subsided into exhaustion, in which hope, though present, was but a faint glimmer.

The Wilfred Owen settings, which offset collective mourning with private pain, were sung by Ian Bostridge and Thomas Hampson, with Bostridge's combination of wide-eyed shock and bitter scorn contrasting with Hampson's agonised rage. Neither of them has ever been bettered in this music, and when Hampson intoned, "I am the enemy you killed, my friend," people wept. The soprano, Marina Mescheriakova, isn't quite in the same league: her voice, though beautiful, lacks fullness in its lower registers; the requisite hieratic, sacerdotal quality sometimes slips in favour of violent dramatisation. The chorus, tentative at Et Lux Perpetue, didn't strike form until the Dies Irae, but were matchless from then on. A harrowing experience - and a very great evening.