Any artwork dealing with Auschwitz is certain to arouse strong feelings, and William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice, published in 1979, compounded the challenge by placing its tale of a Polish concentration camp survivor in the frame of a lurid after-story. In 1947 New York, Sophie encounters a charismatic, deranged young American, Nathan, who obsesses about her and with whom she eventually commits suicide – choosing her own death as a consequence for having had to select one of her own children for sacrifice in order to save the other child, and herself, from Auschwitz.

The novel, like the film which followed, is nothing if not American in character, and it’s not impossible to imagine what a Sophie’s Choice opera by Leonard Bernstein or John Adams might be like. Though Nicholas Maw was long resident in America, his opera has an undertow of British understatement, especially in the first two acts, which cannot be mistaken for a desire to represent detachment from the subject, even though Maw’s reluctance to allow his vocal writing to flower into aria-like melody suggests a determination to shun precisely the kind of sentimental explicitness which Styron embraces so wholeheartedly. However, as the full horror of the story emerges in the later acts, Maw unleashes – mainly in the interludes – the kind of intense and well-nigh expressionistic material that is the crowning glory of his large-scale orchestral masterwork Odyssey: and although the vocal writing continues to resist the possibility of Britten-like lyric forms, there is a sense of pathos without mawkishness in the closing scenes which is tellingly represented in this BBC film of the sixth and – to date – final Covent Garden performance.

It’s a tribute to the competence and stamina of the cast – Angelika Kirchschlager and Dale Duesing are on stage virtually throughout – that they all survive the ordeal by camera so well. Trevor Nunn’s staging, conceived for the large theatre, inevitably appears overwrought in places when the camera creeps in close but it would have been asking a lot for the TV director to have matched the composer’s restraint. Sophie’s Choice might have been more comfortably operatic with a less wordy libretto and with more concentratedly dramatic music. Yet as Maw’s last major work it merits the kind of serious attention which this admirable and timely release makes possible.