A student recently asked Milton Babbitt what he made of the plot of Moses und Aron. “Oh I don’t know, I’m not really a plot person,” he replied. “Boy meets Girl, Moses meets Aron…” Of course, there’s more than a grain of truth to Babbitt’s quip. The bonus to this appearance of Schoenberg’s “opera fragment” on DVD is a discussion which does not attempt to explain what the piece is “about” (dread phrase) but throws up some arresting images along the way, not least the suggestion that Moses is a “Führer des Jüdischen Volks”. It certainly accords with the director Reto Nickler’s conception of the work as “a highly topical psychodrama that represents the thorny path between theory and practice”. Indeed, Schoenberg’s absurdly unrealisable stage directions make the last scene of Les Troyens pale into insignificance.

Nickler takes an effectively practical tack, abstract but straightforward. Three-dimensional video conjures the miracles of the first act, staff into serpent and so forth, while in Act 2 it becomes the focus of consumer materialism. Aron dons a natty gold jacket while the chorus wave hankies of the same material, economically symbolising the banality of their demands and theology. The Golden Calf is revealed as a set of letters spelling out ICH BIN GOTT, the counterpart of Moses’s tablets of stone.

Such intelligent, dramatic pragmatism lends equal lustre to the musical values. It’s good to hear a conductor who is steeped in verismo conveying the underestimated sweep of these Biblical declamations, even if it is inevitably at the expense of many of the notes. Both Grundheber and Moser seize every cue for lyrical expression, and the super-size chorus is every bit the collective hero/anti-hero of the piece. The prologue to Act 2 is typically stark and precise, with harsh lighting and tenebrous murk reflecting the sotto voce polyphony of abandonment as the Jewish people sit motionless. Their grim suitcases, their raised clenched fists and mob behaviour, all allude to fresher horrors in Jewish history, until they whip out gold party-frocks and dinner-jackets for the orgy. The Ephraimites become Scaramangas, murdering the true believers to a backdrop of clicking cameraphones and rolling TV coverage – then Z-list celebs totter on as alter egos of the Four Naked Virgins, copulating with the God-letters while Buñuel-esque images of cruelty dominate the giant TV screens. No wonder the Viennese loved it.