Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov is back at Covent Garden, and there are ninjas. This isn’t a spoiler. There hasn’t been a note of music at this point, and it’s almost the first thing you see. A ginger child in a weird mask is playing with a spinning top when the black-clad assassins stalk on and slit his throat. Cue gasps. Well, the director is Richard Jones, after all; quirky, garish and occasionally macabre is what he does. And the (alleged) murder of a child pretender to the Russian throne is the horror that drives the entire plot, at least in the first (1869) version of the opera, which is what we’re given here.

In other words, this is the first and shortest form of Boris, substantially different from the more familiar 1872 revision which was the only version Mussorgsky actually saw staged. It’s essentially a first draft, and it’s increasingly popular with directors, being lean, raw and all those other austere qualities that so flatter modernist tastes. You suspect they’d gladly lose the Coronation Scene too, if they could get away with it.

Terfel lunged at his big soliloquies with a jagged, baleful edge to his voice

Jones runs its seven scenes without an interval, in a single 140 minute stretch. For all his struggles with his........

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