Here’s another instalment of Salzburg’s project to record all Mozart’s operas last summer. Like others we have already had, a fully rounded musical performance is marred by a staging that includes all sorts of gimmicks. Here he (or she?) is a Cupid-like creature apparently directing the action at crucial points. Claus Guth is the errant director, also, among other things, allowing the Count for whatever reason to throw two rats out of the window.

Christian Schmidt’s sets and costumes suffice. But he gives us one all-purpose set, which transmutes the action not very subtly from one scene to the next. In many cases this works quite well, but merely to use lighting to suggest the garden is pushing things a little far.

Guth’s Personenregie is of an astute calibre. The relations among the characters and how they go wrong during one day suggest a pent-up range of interconnected feelings. For the most part that works well, but the apparent neurotic state of the Count and Countess stretches belief. As Richard Fairman put it in Opera magazine, we are greeted with “all-German symbolism and analysis, no Italian humour or spontaneity”. That makes for heavy going.

By and large the opera could hardly be more strongly cast. Anna Netrebko is a dreamy, vulnerable and beautifully sung Susanna, and Ildebrando D’Arcangelo’s smouldering Figaro is a really macho rival to the Count. Bo Skovhus plays that central role almost as a man psychologically disturbed, and for my taste he sings it in a grotesquely aggressive way. This Almaviva could charm nobody. Dorothea Röschmann’s Countess is, not surprisingly, overwrought, but vocally she is a Countess to die for. Christine Schäfer’s Cherubino, still in short pants, sings and acts with confidence. Franz-Josef Selig’s chair-bound Bartolo and Marie McLaughlin’s Marcellina are keenly observed. McLaughlin and the anonymous-sounding Basilio are allowed their fourth-act arias, which makes the performance even more drawn out.

Harnoncourt had warned festival visitors to expect a very serious Figaro and is true to his word. Too often the music is hard-driven with the over-accentuation this conductor is prone to. Brian Large is the observant video director.

There are several more amenable and user-friendly versions on DVD – that conducted by Gardiner (DG) and the 1994 staging that opened new Glyndebourne (NVC Arts, 1/00). Both are well cast and Andreas Schmidt at Glyndebourne shows how to make the Count dominant without over-emphasis. Some may like to sample the CD version of the new set, where, of course, you avoid the faults of the staging.