It is exactly 90 years since Janácek's Katya Kabanova was first heard in Brno and 60 years since the late, Charles Mackerras conducted its British premiere. In dedicating the performance to Mackerras's memory, Welsh National Opera's new artistic director David Pountney was acknowledging the incalculable debt owed to Mackerras, not least by this company.

Katie Mitchell's staging is now 10 years old but, such is the powerful immediacy of the music, it always feels wholly new and of the moment, with this fine cast delivering by far the strongest production of WNO's autumn season. In the title role, Amanda Roocroft paces herself carefully so that the searing emotion of Janácek's characterisation of the young Katya – trapped in a wholly oppressive environment and mercilessly bullied by her mother-in-law, the Kabanicha – emerged steadily over the course of the evening. Roocroft is at her impassioned best in the soliloquy where she has already decided to commit suicide, always implied as the devastating yet only possible outcome of the first adulterous kiss.

It is to tenor Peter Wedd's huge credit that his Boris, both in physical demeanour and highly expressive singing, is able to signal the force of his attraction for Katya from the outset. But, victim that she already is, the coup de foudre of such a love inevitably brings about her unhinging, and the thunderstorm where she publicly confesses all is as much the climax of the opera as her fatal leap into the Volga. Conductor Lothar Koenigs bring a cataclysmic, expressionistic turbulence to these moments.

Leah-Marian Jones's Kabanicha is chilling, while Stephen Rooke's portrayal of Katya's husband, Tichon, succeeds in reflecting an underlying tenderness for his wife as well as the overwhelming burden his mother imposes on them. How right Mackerras was: Janácek has it all.