Though far from being the topless, red haired pantomime with which Samuel Ramey used to entertain us in this opera, Roland Schwab’s new Munich production still overfills the stage with extras trying too hard to be diabolical or sexy or both. Poor Boito: companies just won’t trust his version of Goethe’s Faust, virtually a summum contra Gounod’s perceived frivolousness, to be performed with genuine seriousness. It’s certainly not perfect as a work. Predictable polish with words to be set is more often matched by ingenuity of choices of key and harmony than distinctive musico-dramatic melodic setting.

Schwab and designers place the work in a broken-down stadium – with moving floors and walls – peopled by contemporarily dressed hippies, bikers, goths and emos. Mefistofele’s control extends to running what looks awfully like a movie of the 9/11 Twin Towers attack. Then the production gets psychology (with a capital P) to represent the women he conjures up for Faust: Kristīne Opolais’s Margherita and Heike Grötzinger’s ultra-tarty Marta are already clearly disturbed while, in Act 4, Faust projects Elena (Helen of Troy) on to a nurse tending mental patients. Despite such interpolatations the staging remains essentially naturalistic.

René Pape’s Mefistofele is restrained and autocratic according to the director’s concept – and limited by the singer’s own old-school operatic acting. (Most moves are transferred to strong beats in the orchestra and canoodling with lascivious playmates is not a strong point.) He exudes authority by his well-schooled German style of Italian declamation. Calleja is also far less camp (and, for that matter, wimpish) than has become the norm for Faust, to the opera’s benefit. Both men are in seriously good voice. As is Opolais, who lavishes no small weight of tone on the part, particularly affecting in the prison scene. The chorus go to with a will, realising that this still under-performed work can be as much a vehicle for them as the operas of Boito’s ‘miglior fabbro’ Verdi.

The whole – well recorded and helpfully filmed – is most precisely organised, balanced and conducted by Omer Meir Wellber, who is, nonetheless, unable to inject that spark of italianità that (as in Muti’s 1995 RCA performance on CD) can translate Boito’s heavier-scored passages in the Prologue and Epilogue away from sounding like an unlikely transalpine collaboration with Bruckner. Yet, reservations aside, this release is a good first calling post for Boito’s drama.