Don Giovanni, Royal Opera House, London

When the Royal Opera House announced it was doing a deal with The Sun to bring in a new kind of audience for the opening night of the autumn season, there was much sneering in some quarters, with accusations that it was being "patronising" and "slumming it" being bandied about. That it was simultaneously going to broadcast the event live to a hundred cinemas just compounded the crime. What, piping Don Giovanni to the proles? Pearls before swine!

The evening opened with a graceful speech in which ROH chief executive Tony Hall welcomed the new audience, hoped they would develop a taste for this art, and thanked the Helen Hamlyn Trust for making this outreach possible. Then the curtain went up. And guess what? Unusually, not a single mobile went off in the course of the evening, nor did one see, as one often does in the top-price stalls, corporate guests focusing on their BlackBerrys rather than the stage. If this was The Sun's effect, let's have more of it.

And what a perfect show to usher in this hopeful new era. Francesca Zambello's production may have a wonky conclusion – a giant "it could be you" hand swinging down from the heavens, and a saucy tableau showing the Don still getting his oats in Hell – but it's strong on vigour and verisimilitude, and it lays bare the bold psychology embedded in the score.

Never before have I heard Donna Anna's account of her attempted rape sung as convincingly as Marina Poplavskaya sings it here. Indeed, with the exception of Ramon Vargas as an underpowered, awkward Don Ottavio, the cast made wonderful sense of the drama. Kyle Ketelsen was an unusually charismatic Leporello, Joyce DiDonato made a brilliantly deranged and vengeful Donna Elvira, while Miah Persson's beautifully sung Zerlina radiated earthy good sense – though I did wonder, again, why Zambello's peasants don't put on finery for their wedding. Only mad people get married in calico.

But if the show had two heroes, one was in the pit: the 83-year-old Sir Charles Mackerras conducted with such subtlety and verve that the action felt spring-heeled. The other hero was Simon Keenlyside, whose Don Giovanni was driven by a compulsive sexual hunger: his cruelty to male rivals was as pathological as his cruelty to female conquests, the personification of rancid negativity. Stripped naked at the end, he cut a pretty miserable figure, but his voice still carried a baleful authority.

In repertory to 30 September (020-7304 4000)