A painting of a child’s spinning top adorns the front cloth of the Royal Opera’s new production of Mussorgsky’s epic. Anyone familiar with Richard Jones’s productions will know that such images tend to take on ever-more baleful significance as the evening goes on, and this Boris Godunov is no exception. The death of the young tsarevich Dmitry while playing with his top is seen on stage before a note of the score has been heard, and the murder is played out again and again as the opera goes on, like a tape being constantly rewound in the slowly unravelling mind of Bryn Terfel’s Boris.

For the first time, the Royal Opera is presenting the original 1869 version of the score, the seven scenes played straight through without an interval in just over two hours, rather than the “definitive” version that Mussorgsky completed three years later. Thus there’s no Polish act, and no scene in Kromy Forest, and some characters, such as David Butt Philip’s strikingly well sung Grigory, aka the False Dmitry, remain sketchily defined, but in this notoriously unfocused masterpiece Jones still manages to sustain the dramatic thread with remarkable assurance.

Miriam Buether’s two-level set and Nicky Gillibrand’s more-or-less period costumes potently mix grandeur with grunge. The coronation scene is a blaze of colour and Boris’s later confrontation with the Holy Fool outside St Basil’s Cathedral is an eloquent juxtaposition of the haves and have-nots. But there’s no clutter, no extraneous business, and the choreographing of the chorus is wonderfully precise – the moment when they all turn as a single body to look at their newly crowned tsar, particularly, is startlingly effective.

With Antonio Pappano and the orchestra emphasising the muscularity of Mussorgsky’s writing, if not always catching the edge of rawness that the original scoring offers, it all provides the space for Boris’s steady mental disintegration to be the true centre of the drama; almost everything else is peripheral.

Terfel makes his character unusually sympathetic – and pathetic too in his death scene, as he clings to his son Fyodor (sung forthrightly by Ben Knight) – his authority constantly compromised by his guilt over the death of Dmitry. His voice may not be ideally dark or sonorous enough for such a definitively Russian role, but his singing is so carefully phrased and nuanced that it hardly matters.

There is real darkness in the rich-toned chronicling of Ain Anger’s Pimen, while John Graham-Hall makes the most of Shuisky’s unctuousness and John Tomlinson, who took the title role in the last revival of the previous ROH production, makes a fine cameo out of Varlaam’s drunkenness.

All Russian life, depicted with Jones’s typically skewed perspectives, really is there.

• In rep at the Royal Opera House, London, until 5 April. Box office: 020-7304 4000.