Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Hungarian State Opera

Judging from the inordinate number of Brits in Saturday's audience, word must have got out: Budapest is back as one of the world's greatest opera companies.

With superhuman demands on orchestra and leading lady, Shostakovich's 1934 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk has fought an uphill battle. Personally denounced by Stalin, the opera took more than 40 years to reappear in its original form. Now everybody's doing it, and I cannot think of another suppressed or neglected score more worthy of seizing its rightful place in the standard repertory.

The first three acts raucously raise sex, violence and Soviet politics to unheard-of satiric heights, only to be put in perspective with a final act of chilling, profound sadness.

Under JánosKovács, the orchestra almost stole the show with its virtuosic attention to detail and vivid colouration, ranging from description of copulation, ironic off-kilter waltzes, paint-peeling interludes and a final scene suffused with hopelessness.

But no show could have been stolen from the Katerina of Georgina Lukács. Her voice is in perfect shape: huge with a gorgeous, dusky timbre, soaring over thick orchestrations, caressing phrases with sublime pianissimiand underlining the nasty bits with demonic chest voice. Lukácscarefully calibrated Katerina's inexorable downward spiral from frustrated, humiliated housewife to a point where murder becomes matter of fact (kissing her lover while bludgeoning her husband) and illicit sex something to be flaunted, eventually embracing death with a determination not to go quietly.

Mellifluous-voiced Vagyim Zaplecsnyij was her rakish, vainglorious Sergei, the gigolo who crawls through her bedroom window "to borrow a book" and becomes the catalyst in her meteoric rise from oppression as well as the cause of her downfall. István Berczelly was magnificently odious as the father-in-law served mushrooms with rat poison sauce by Katerina. Outstanding among a magnificent supporting cast was JánosTóth, whose inspired lunacy as the police chief suggested John Cleese.

Director Attila Vidnyánszky wisely relied on the score to convey its inherent humour and, despite a flash of nudity, never added distracting business when Shostakovich tells us all we need to know.

Tel +36 1 332 7914

In repertory until March 30