Blood-drenched and sorrowful, majestic and raw, Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s The Minotaur, commissioned by the Royal Opera House and given its world premiere last night, plunders the extremes of human nature in music of coruscating, storming beauty.

Set to a powerful text by poet David Harsent, boldly directed by Stephen Langridge and designed with elegant, abstract simplicity by Alison Chitty — all Birtwistle regulars — it relates the ancient myth of the half-man, half-monster conceived after a night of passion between King Minos’s wife and Poseidon’s irresistible white bull.

This freak offspring, hauntingly portrayed by bass-baritone Sir John Tomlinson, who was the Green Knight in Gawain, Birtwistle’s 1991 ROH commission, is imprisoned in a labyrinth and fed on human victims. Tomlinson’s mute groanings and flaying had terrible pathos.

Primeval violence and ritual sacrifice shape the drama, punctuated by the sex-starved longings of Ariadne, fearsomely portrayed by Christine Rice, who sets her gaze on Theseus, sung by the excellent, lithe Danish baritone Johan Reuter. It is his destiny to enter the labyrinth and kill the Minotaur, the climax of the opera.

In the lead-up to this long-awaited premiere, on the Today programme and elsewhere, there have been well-intentioned attempts to pretend Birtwistle’s music is really no harder than a night out at Chicago or Billy Elliot if only you put your mind to the matter.

This is disingenuous. Complex? Yes. Difficult? Damned difficult. Birtwistle demands every ounce of your attention, urges you to use your full listening brain to detect the rich layers, poignant details or noisy mayhem of his score, his most voluptuous yet.

Low woodwind, sensuous strings and the spangly clatter of the cimbalon colour the orchestra in sombre, glistening tones. The rewards are at once unsettling and exhilarating. I had some reservations about the harpie-like Keres and perhaps the designs didn’t quite hold the stage in part one before the shocking first appearance of the Minotaur. These are minor points.

Cast, chorus and orchestra, lovingly conducted by Antonio Pappano, gave their exemplary best. Birtwistle observed last week that no conductor until Pappano “had played my music as if it were Verdi”. As the audience cheered, the composer impulsively pushed his conductor forward into the limelight. But the applause, though deserved by all, was primarily for yet further proof of Birtwistle’s epic creative clarity.

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