Asked in the accompanying documentary about the “message” of Die Zauberflöte, Nikolaus Harnoncourt responds, à la John Lennon, “love, love, love”. Director Martin Kuej dwells on the dark side, bandying words like “unheimlich” (“sinister”) and “Abgründe” (“abysses”). His Konzept (here definitely with a “K”) is Die Zauberflöte as retrospective nightmarish fantasy.

Rolf Glittenberg’s minimalist set is a revolving polystyrene labyrinth that vaguely suggests a prison and/or an asylum. The Three Ladies are blind provocateuses who virtually rape Tamino and later turn into strip-tease artistes. Monostatos, done up as a King-Kong lookalike, presides over a bunch of blood-bespattered, axe-wielding slaves. The Old Priest who begins Tamino’s initiation looks like a well-muscled gym instructor, the two priests in Act 2 are Mafia-style thugs, and the Two Armed Men verge on the camp. Their byplay fatally undercuts the lovers’ final reunion, potentially one of the most moving scenes in all opera.

The trial by Fire and Water ends with a video projection of Pamina and Tamino in a submerged BMW and in the final scene they are wheeled in on trolleys, unconscious, and, unsurprisingly, look traumatised when they wake up. This is a pretentious, unmagical, often muddled Zauberflöte, one that leaves a nasty taste – exactly the opposite of Mozart and Schikaneder’s intentions.

The staging is only partly redeemed by the musical side of things. Harnoncourt’s conducting, often restless, sometimes self-indulgent, seizes on every opportunity for disruptive, destabilising detail. The duet “Bei Männern” is eccentrically languorous (“love, love, love”), while at the other extreme Pamina’s “Ach, ich fühl’s” is almost frenetically driven. Except for the excruciatingly tuned Three Boys, the singing is fair-to-good. The best performances are Matti Salminen’s grizzled but still ripely sonorous Sarastro, Ruben Drole’s wide-eyed, warmly sung though unfunny Papageno and Elena Mosuc’s steely, pinpoint-accurate Queen of the Night. Julia Kleiter is a forthright, strident Pamina, short on softness and sweetness, while Christoph Strehl, as a more-or-less permanently bemused Tamino, uses the text expressively but sings with too little dynamic variety and tends to scoop up to notes. Anyone looking for enchantment and, ultimately, elation in Mozart’s Enlightenment pantomime-parable should give this a wide berth.