It’s not clear what La Scala intended to capture for posterity in this recording. The singers, orchestra and chorus are drawn from the La Scala Academy, while the director and conductor are two marquee names, Peter Stein and Ádám Fischer respectively. The end result has quality ingredients but doesn’t come to the boil. The worst decisions were made by the professionals.

Peter Stein, 79, is a director whose late career seems to be in full-blown flight away from the radicalism that characterised his early work in Berlin. While Mozart’s Flute cries out for magic and not deconstruction, Stein’s milquetoast show gives his young singers and his audience little to chew on.

The most tasteless decision should have been scrapped long before it made a dress rehearsal. Every director of Flute should grapple with Mozart’s Enlightenment vision being not so enlightened when it comes to gender and race. But by plopping Sascha Emanuel Kramer’s Monostatos in a grass skirt, slathering him in black body paint and surrounding him with a group of whooping, ‘primitive’ followers in the same garb – more coal-black paint on white bodies – Stein and his costume designer Anna Maria Heinreich simply reinforce what Monostatos tells us about black skins containing black souls. It’s gauche, offensive, horribly retrograde.

There are a few nice touches elsewhere but it’s hard to find room to praise the thrifty looking Carry-on-up-the-Nile designs by Ferdinand Wögerbauer, cute bird costumes or panto lions, when the colouring-book images also encompass characters not far off Enid Blyton’s golliwogs. Dramaturgically, the pace slackens to a crawl in the second half – as it often does if directors aren’t inventive – as Papageno and Tamino sit in the gloom and Sarastro’s brotherhood assume stock positions, fake beards quivering on young cheeks.

The standout performances come from the central pair of lovers: Tamino may end up not being ideal repertoire for Martin Piskorski’s full-blooded tenor but it’s a punchy, gutsy effort. The Egyptian soprano Fatma Said is a BBC New Generation Artist and hers is the most complete display of Mozartian grace, capped by a peachy ‘Ach, ich fühls’.

Till von Orlowsky is an engaging Papageno but not a natural comedian; and if his amiable pratfalls drew laughs from the Milanese crowd, they’ve been edited out. Yasmin Özkan’s Queen of the Night delivers a full-throttle ‘Der Hölle Rache’ with wobbly high Fs. Elissa Huber’s First Lady is strident, and her laurels are snatched by Lady No 3, the vibrant, fruity mezzo of Mareike Jankowski. There’s insufficient gravel and gravitas in Martin Summer’s Sarastro, but it’s a tough gig for a young man. The chorus are sonorous and well-blended.

Ádám Fischer makes a strong start with the Academy orchestra, in an Overture flickering with lively warmth. As the opera goes on, his choices become more questionable: lingering tempos don’t suit an orchestra that has spark but no particular richness of sound.