Innocence, Royal Opera House review ★★★★★

'A bank, a school and now a 16th birthday party....' When the latest mass shooting in the US was reported last week, the BBC reporter summed up the latest of 140 such incidents there this year. Within days there will be another. But the rest of the world is not immune to gunmen. No one who lived through that day, Norwegians and observers alike, will forget the attacks in Oslo and Utøya on 22 July 2011.

The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and librettist Sofi Oksanen imagine in their opera Innocence, the shooting of 10 students and a teacher at an international school in their own capital, Helsinki. And yes, we see this terrible attack unfolding in episodes as, 10 years later, a chance meeting at a wedding revives terrible memories.

Innocence, given its UK premiere at Covent Garden, opens with the small but happy wedding of Thomas and Stela. Why so few guests? What does Stela not know about the family background? Truths emerge when the stand-in waitress, Tereza, recognises the father, mother and brother of the boy who killed her daughter, Markéta. And now that young man is free again...

Chloe Lamford's set brings together the past and present. Photo: Tristram Kenton

Simon Stone, directing, brings to Innocence all the realism and pace that galvanised Phaedra at the National Theatre. Chloe Lamford's modular cuboid set and James Farncombe's lighting create an ever-evolving – and ever-revolving – series of spaces: the wedding reception room and kitchen, the classroom, cupboards for hiding in, doors to be trapped behind. Highly effective and disturbing are the attempts of students to evade the mostly unseen killer, frantically looking for hiding places that may liberate or trap them.

Saariaho's fragmentary music winds through the wedding party as it unravels while the flashback shooting escalates. The composer considered calling her new work 'Fresco', partly inspired by the idea of the 13 characters at the Last Supper, and although her idea moved on, her music has the painterly texture of a visual art work rather than traditional lyricism.

This can disappoint. When the priest admits, as one by one the survivors consider their own roles in the atrocity, that he thought there was something wrong with the boy, but did nothing, the moment cries out for a big number. But the confession falls away, and Finnish bass Timo Rihonen's priest is a dull fellow.

Markéta (Vilma Jää, by pillar) and, far right, the killer's friend Iris (Julie Hega). Photo: Tristan Kenton

French soprano Sandrine Piau as the killer's mother, Patricia, sings with a fragile brightness while as his father Henrik, one of our own top baritones, Christopher Purves, conveys with immaculate diction both the relief at one happy family event with the guilt of having taught his son 'to shoot like a man'.

Others are not in the clear, either. Abused fellow student Iris (impressive French-Cameroonian all-rounder Julie Hega) encouraged the boy. The bridegroom hero-worshipped his older brother and hid evidence of his deadly mindset. Markéta taunted the boy.

Finnish musician Vilma Jää as Markéta yelps the traditional Finnish calls of herders, a very arresting and unsettling technique. Elsewhere the overlapping of song and speech is interesting, adding to the overall feeling that Innocence is stronger dramatically than musically. Tereza is sung with heartrending passion by Finnish-Swedish mezzo-soprano Jenny Carlstedt.

Christopher Purves excels as the father of the boy who killed the daughter of Tereza (Jenny Carlstedt). Photo: Tristram Kenton

Susanna Mälkki conducts the 40-plus offstage singers of the Royal Opera Chorus who intone the names of the dead – Naomi, Elise, Ruut, Joonatan – and a huge Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, heavy with percussion,

Can anything good come of such an atrocity, Innocence asks. When we first meet the students, they seem scarred for life, unable to function normally again. But we glimpse their adult lives. One is inspired to become a doctor. Another overcomes his fears out of love for his own daughter. There are shafts of light in this fresco, but overall the colours are very dark indeed.

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Innocence is sung in Finnish, English, German, Spanish and French, with English surtitles. Further performances are on 20, 26 April; 1, 4 May