As a lone bassoon sounds the first of Mussorgsky’s infinitely mournful laments, the curtain rises on what looks like a giant wooden rabbit-hutch – askew, windowless and claustrophobic. Inside it, a chorus of peasants is cowering in abject gloom.

This may be the greatest of Russian operas, on the greatest of Russian subjects: a tragic soul tormented in a tragic land. But there’s not an onion dome or snowy steppe of local Russian colour to be seen.

Seven scenes, 130 minutes, a coronation, a rebellion, a mad scene and a Tsar’s death later, we are still stuck in the askew rabbit-hutch in abject gloom. The implication of Tim Albery’s new English National Opera production and Tobias Hoheisel’s sets is clear. Though the costumes suggest the late 19th century, we are watching the eternally recurring nightmare of a country trapped in primitive feudalism. And, within that, the equally inescapable personal agony of that nation’s embodiment: the Tsar Boris, wracked with Macbeth-like guilt for the child-murder that gave him the throne.

It’s a justifiable staging concept, especially as ENO has opted to do Mussorgsky’s relentlessly single-track original version of Boris, which doesn’t even have the momentary light relief of the love scene in Poland. But my God, it makes for a morbid November evening.

What rivets the attention is Mussorgsky’s score, with its guttural colours, chromatic instability and baleful threnodies. Plenty of operas depict madness. But only this one seems to draw its sounds from inside a madman’s head. And although the chorus’s lines need tidying, the piece is conducted by Edward Gardner with proper savagery. Even the manic bells, amplified to disco level, sound like clanging prison gates.

But such a score, and such grandiose tragedy, calls for an epic protagonist, and that is where this show starts to underwhelm. Peter Rose is a well-schooled English bass, and in his confrontation with John Graham-Hall’s strident Shuisky, the traitorous weasel in his court, he musters impressive levels of froth and frenzy. But the depth and darkness of Boris and, in the end, the magisterial self-awareness, escape him. Mind you, he’s not even allowed a decent death scene. Having apparently expired, he is inexplicably made to walk upstage and off.

Elsewhere, Brindley Sherratt is moving as the wise old chronicler Pimen. And Robert Murray catches the ear as the omnipresent Simpleton, the fool who sees the bigger picture more clearly than anyone.

In its original version, free of the varnish that Rimsky-Korsakov later misapplied, Boris is an astonishingly raw and compelling opera, unlike anything else. But those prone to depression might be better off at Mamma Mia!.

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