First shown on British TV a Christmas or two ago, this presents an unusual and interesting approach to opera on video, a hybrid documentary-cum-filmed performance. Sir Charles Mackerras’s splendid CD recording (Telarc, 8/00) provides a lively soundtrack to excerpted scenes staged in reasonable lip-sync by Moshinsky and the original cast among the expanses of Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace. They add up to about an hour’s-worth, interspersed with a documentary about Moshinsky’s views of opera, characters and filming.

How ravishing it all is to look at. Both the documentary and staging glow with local colour – though this is more than window-dressing, conveying the exotic (and erotic) shock which Turkish culture delivered to Mozart’s Europe. More interestingly, the filming vindicates the advantages of video recording, by allowing the singers to flesh out performances that in sound alone often seemed less complete.

Admittedly, Paul Groves, beefily Anglo-Saxon in aspect, has difficulty por-traying a tormented young Spaniard as sensitively as he sings the role; but he manages. And if Yelda Kodalli, amusingly the only Turk in the cast, sounded rather light and girlish as Konstanze on disc, we can see now that it’s because she is unusually young and vulnerable in her characterisation – and very effectively so, making ‘Marten aller Arten’ more brave than bravura.

Désirée Rancatore’s ginger-haired Blonde enhances her crisp singing with a truly fearsome manner, pouring tea with lethal gentility, and Linton Atkinson’s rather restrained Pedrillo is illuminated by goofy charm. On CD Peter Rose seemed a rather light basso cantante Osmin, exceptionally mellifluous but lacking in menace; this, though, is offset by his towering physical bulk and nicely judged blend of the monstrous and the fatuous. Only the westernised liberal Pasha Selim is less effective. Anglo-Swiss actor Oliver Tobias’s matinée-idol looks and gently melancholy manner present too slight a threat to give his final volte-face – undermining the then stereotype of the cruel and passionate Turk – its proper effect.

Altogether, though, the performance, in fine sound and radiant vision, is successful enough to make you want more. But there’s the rub – this is neither fish nor fowl. The documentary doesn’t have enough space to explore in any depth; there’s no detailed look at the ‘Turkish’ instrumentation, for example, though authentic percussion is a feature of Mackerras’s recording (mercifully more restrained than Harnoncourt’s – Teldec, 5/88), and no consideration of the whys and wherefores of filming the opera in the first place. Equally, the excerpts leave one waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Given how difficult it must have been to set the whole thing up, one wonders why they didn’t film a complete performance. All the same, it’s plenty of fun as it is, and a delight to eye and ear.