A perplexing issue. The performance has class. The Vienna Philharmonic now play this score with greater naturalness and virtuosity than when they recorded it for Mackerras in 1978. It’s always a pleasure that Salonen – after his Tristan with Peter Sellars – has been asked for more opera. Here this questing composer/conductor has discovered a hard, cold, motoric Janáček, the contemporary of earlier Prokofiev and Shostakovich, even of Gershwin. It is a sound wholly aligned to the stage production.

The singing is mostly terrific. Many noted Emilia Martys have been tested by the exposed, barely accompanied high-lying phrases with which Janáček filled the part in the final scene of Act 3, the nearest he came to writing a kind of Wagnerian Liebestod for the soprano voice. Denoke has these notes and the technique and breathing to deliver them. Her men are strong (Schmeckenbecher’s Kolenaty and Davies’s Hauk-Šendorf both free of caricatured barking and over-acting) and as for the Krista, Lithuanian Jurgita Adamonyte˙, it will probably not be just in this opera that she’ll have a distinctive future.

The Swiss theatre director and (let us not forget) composer Christoph Marthaler and his regular German design partner Anna Viebrock gave Bayreuth a sensational Tristan und Isolde in 2005 (Opus Arte, 5/10). Their methodology was one of achieving a huge amount of emotion from normalisation of events and atmosphere with occasional expressionist touches. They follow a similar path here, but less surely. To the standard Viebrock vulgar-taste living-room set (here a courtroom) are added two glass-box wings, one a smoking room for institutional nurses, the other a greenhouse. This supporting image of human beings in a laboratory is emphasised by three soundless dumbshow scenes which preface each act, the first a joke about human beings who live extra-long. The relevance to the opera is obvious but, as seen in Hannes Rossacher’s random (and often frustratingly distant) filming of the show, the scenes have little impact apart from the odd touch of comedy.

The greatest invention of the production is the physical stylisation of Marty’s uncomfortable ageing during the action. Presumably the increasingly dysfunctional movements of Kolenaty, Vítek and Prus are related to this. The booklet-note might have given a hint here – also as to why Janáček’s Act 2 Stage Technician has become ‘a conscientious objector’ (yet acts mostly as a hospital orderly) and Cleaning Woman ‘a Scottish maid’ (just because she’s Linda Ormiston?). Much of the result though will please, rather bizarrely, those who like ‘straight’, non-interventionist stagings.