One of the advantages of watching opera on DVD is that you get the best seat in the house. In the theatre the panoramic projections that form the backdrop to English National Opera’s production of Death in Venice could not be seen to full effect from some angles but Opus Arte gives us an ideal vantage point. It might have seemed that no DVD could surpass the beauty of Pier Luigi Pizzi’s inimitably Italian staging from La Fenice but Deborah Warner’s production is surely its equal – visually ravishing in its luminous images of sea and sky, reflecting shadowy gondoliers and heat-hazed outlines of the Venetian skyline. The lighting designer, Jean Kalman, deserves special credit.

In the central role of Gustav von Aschenbach, John Graham-Hall takes us on a devastating journey. Essentially a character tenor, he is parsimonious with the opera’s vocal beauty (the recitatives are invariably more telling than the passages of arioso) but he has stamina, clear words and the ability to penetrate to the heart of the role. Highly charged from the start, his Aschenbach is seen to collapse before our eyes, torn apart from inside by the psychological battle being waged within. In his seven-fold Dionysiac role, Andrew Shore is sometimes dry of voice but presents a vivid collection of personalities (if only the recent obituaries of John Shirley-Quirk had not reminded us how powerfully insidious a presence he was in this opera). With Tim Mead as a radiant Apollo and Sam Zaldivar a cheekily down-to-earth Tadzio, all the supporting parts are well cast, and Edward Gardner is as ever an authoritative Britten conductor, exercising a grip on every bar that makes the opera seem not a note too long.

It is criminal that the original production with Pears as Aschenbach was not filmed. But we are lucky to have a real choice now on DVD, from Glyndebourne’s 1990 production with Robert Tear’s unsentimental Aschenbach to the visually sumptuous La Fenice production. This latest release, expertly filmed by Opus Arte, is arguably the best of all. No other performance on DVD has presented the psychological dilemma posed by Thomas Mann and Britten with such intensity.