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Mitridate, re di Ponto at Hamburg State Opera (Photo: Brinkhoff/Mögenburg)

Sometimes it’s really fine to give a piece a bit of a hand – and Mozart’s Mitridate, written at the age of 14 for performances in Milan, is surely one such. Nobody can know what the original audience expected from such an old-fashioned form (well, we do know they wanted endless piles of coloratura, I guess), but for us it feels important to find something 'Mozartian' in it, a germ of the genius who would write Figaro and the Flute. Well, we can all wish, and there are certainly moments in Mitridate where you are struck by a phrase or treatment of text or feeling that feels prophetic. Anyone who has been following conductor Ian Page’s journey through Mozart’s life 250 years on (we have now reached 1775 and Wolfgang is 19) will know that such moments do exist – and also, importantly, that they could also have been written by many contemporary composers. By this stage of his life, 1770, Mozart had produced the miraculous (in parts) Apollo et Hyacinthus, but his first actually well-known piece, Exsultate, jubilate, is still a couple of years off.

What Mozart did (possibly better than anyone, ever) was to study furiously and learn in practice, through composition, and Mitridate is a brilliant student work, assiduously tailored to its virtuoso singers, and providing all the ingredients of opera seria required by Milan in 1770: a morally improving story, a range of emotions reflecting amorous anguish and intrigue among a riven family, plus all the usual conflicts of heart and head. Singers required plenty of chances to show off, and the orchestra wanted to sound good too. Mozart provided all this in spades and at great length.

I’m not sure that editing was among his talents at that age, and this where the bit of help that we can lend comes in. This Hamburg production – evidently the first ever in the city – takes a pleasantly non-literal attitude to the issues raised. Mozart wrote over three hours of music for the opera, whittled down here to two and a half: only three arias actually excised, I think, but the endless recit is also heavily cut – but with no obvious harm to the drama. Presented with the orchestra on stage, it is more than the 'semi-staged' it is billed as on its August transfer to Salzburg, but this method does allow the director Birgit Kajtna-Wönig to slim down the action to its core elements of conversation and confrontation. For the most part this is done pretty well – the five main singers were all strong on stage and well-directed in the Personenregie way, though the playground fight between brothers Sifare and Farnace was a bit rubbish, and some of the audience and press clearly felt short-changed.

The other fairly irrelevant wrinkle was an attempt to create a metaphor linking the musical performance and the drama of the opera, with Mitridate bullying various orchestra members, players stepping out to play up front, conductor Adam Fischer playing the role of Court Kapellmeister, that sort of thing – also not wildly successful. But none of this really detracted from what was happening on the stage, draped from flies to apron in a fabric suggesting some craggy fastness (designed by Marie-Luise Otto), with occasional computer-generated projections (of boats, for example), a few hanging boulders, and proactively-used surtitle screens to highlight important bits.

Mitridate, re di Ponto at Hamburg State Opera (Photo: Brinkhoff/Mögenburg)

Stripping away nearly everything that isn’t music turns the strongest focus on singing, and this was uniformly highly impressive. Robert Murray has a bit of experience with the title role, and plays the king as a not completely unattractive mix of bullish determination undercut by crippling insecurities about power – a tough job, being up against the Romans – and family: bad son Farnace is conspiring against him, and the nicer one Sifare is making eyes at Mitridate’s girlfriend Aspasia. His music covers all these emotions, with the widest leaps, the most extravagant high notes, and Murray adds some lovely pianissimo passages, and delivers the lengthy recits with really gripping intensity and meaning. This is a massive performance that creates a compelling human story.

Nor is he let down by his companions. 14-year-old boys have extravagant emotions (often including hopeless love) and family feelings, and you feel that Mozart really let himself go in incarnating these in music. And the breadth of the opera means he can create four or five really convincing, rounded human portraits. The coloratura fireworks of Aspasia (Nikola Hillebrand) and Sifare (Olivia Boen) are particularly thrilling, but it is often in the accompagnati and soulful arias that Mozart does his best work: such as Aspasia’s cavatina ‘Pallid’ombre’, full of layered winds and gently chugging strings, the longest, most beautiful melody delivered in a pure legato. And again, towards the end, the repentant Farnace (the very impressive, dark-toned Adriana Bignani Lesca) sings the racked ‘Gia dagli occhi’, a piece of dawning self-awareness that would hardly feel out of place in La clemenza di Tito 20 years later – really gorgeously delivered. Company singer Kady Evanyshyn, in the smaller role of Ismene, also did a fine job, and her last sad aria ‘Tu sai per che m’accese’, accompanied by forestage string quartet, was really lovely.

Maestro Fischer and his modern-instrument band kept things properly moving along with a real sense of dramatic purpose, bringing as much variation as possible to this overwhelmingly major-key score. I know we are all supposed to be completists and purists, but this was a fine edition, really persuasively performed.

At Hamburg until March 7 staatsoper-hamburg.de

New cast in Salzburg in August