Così fan tutte’s ambiguities and ironies lend themselves to updating – as in ENO’s latest production, Glyndebourne’s ocean-liner setting, or Peter Sellars’ notorious ‘Despina’s Diner’. Munich film director and self-confessed ‘opera virgin’ Doris Dörrie applied more imagination, though, rooting her Berlin staging in the early Swinging Sixties, when traditional concepts of morality and fidelity were taking a beating reminiscent of Da Ponte’s day.

However clever the idea, though, Così above all operas has to work musically, or not at all – something Sellars, for one, forgot. It has never been Barenboim’s best opera, but most people would enjoy this in the theatre – mellow, easily paced but lively, and boasting some excellent voices, notably Werner Güra and the sisters, Dorothea Röschmann attacking ‘Come scoglio’ with guns blazing. Roman Trekel is a livewire, nasty Alfonso, though it inclines him to bark, and Daniela Bruera a pretty good Despina.

And on the whole Dörrie’s konzept works remarkably well. A specialist in sour-sweet romance, she goes right to the emotional heart of the music, far more important than the period dressing, and brings out both consequences of Alfonso’s little joke, the immediate comedy and the lasting pain and confusion – with a surprising ending for the two cynics. That lets us swallow the clash of styles, wittily presented – the sharp suits and vivid Mary Quant-style dresses, as opposed to Despina’s more laid-back Indian prints (and guru disguise) and the hippie-fied ‘Albanians’, hilariously appropriate in those shaggy coats some of us used to wear. The Sixties glasshouse set is appealing, and only the opening air terminal, full of complaisant hostesses, seems too broad. The costumes, though – and their removal – do underline that the lovers are a bit old for their characters.

John Eliot Gardiner has produced as well as conducted a superbly ‘authentic’ Così; but this, with little musical compromise and vividly recorded in widescreen and surround-sound, offers a pleasantly rude alternative.