By recasting Britten's medieval monks as coppers, the staging could have replaced the story's mythic resonances with contemporary mundanity. In fact, director Graham Vick's staging was at its most emotionally and musically charged when it created connections between the unfolding story and the lives of the audience.

Nowhere was this relationship clearer than at the end of the piece. Mark Wilde's Madwoman - a searing performance of singing and acting - lamented her lost child. As the voice of the boy's spirit was heard from the upper balcony, a whole section of the audience became part of the performance, each acting a freeze-frame of grief by mourning over a token of childhood: a football, a teddy bear, a T-shirt. It was a devastating moment, an image of the way this simple tale resonated in the minds of listeners, and typical of the way the Birmingham Opera Company integrates communities into its performances.

Staged in the Prommers Arena, with seven players of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group right in the centre, the performance made imaginative use of the space to create the mythical banks of the Curlew River. Iain Paterson's weary Traveller, dressed as a dapper businessman, journeyed to Rodney Clarke's stubborn Ferryman, who at last agreed to take the Madwoman to her son's grave. Whatever the theatrical brilliance of the production - Wilde made his first entrance as the Madwoman pushing a pram through the crowds of Prommers - it was also musically convincing; a moving and imaginative revelation of Britten's most daring work of music theatre.