The Vienna Philharmonic’s Summer Night Concerts, open-air affairs in front of Schönnbrunn Palace, are now rushed on to the market almost as swiftly as their New Year’s Day counterparts from the Musikverein. The 2017 event reunites the orchestra with Christoph Eschenbach, conductor also in 2014, for a programme of music all about magic and the supernatural, with a little extra stardust provided by Renée Fleming.

It’s a mixed bag, in all senses. Things start well with a rousing account of Dvořák’s Carnival overture (with some particularly fine playing in the melancholy central section), after which Fleming sings Armida’s Act 1 aria from the composer’s final opera. She does so seductively and stylishly, her trademark creamy tone now displaying a dash of extra sinew, but also slowly and indulgently. The same goes for a sugary, drawn-out account of Rusalka’s Song to the Moon – Fleming takes over a minute longer here than she does on her Gramophone Award-winning recording of the role with Mackerras (Decca, 11/98).

Those performances rather set the tone. Eschenbach lets the Hänsel und Gretel prelude and The Sleeping Beauty numbers drag, and the orchestra’s winds suffer from some suspect intonation in the former. The first two of a trio of Rachmaninov songs feel almost funereal, while Walter Mnatsakanov’s busy arrangement of ‘Spring Waters’ occasionally risks drowning Fleming out.

Happily things pick up with ‘Hedwig’s Theme’ from John Williams’s music for Harry Potter, in which the Vienna strings swirl and swoop around their lines with evident relish, and Eschenbach is also more lively in the Stravinsky (the last three numbers of the 1919 Firebird Suite) and Smetena that follow.

The recorded sound is remarkably clear and airy, if short on bite, and distant applause from the Schönnbrunn grounds is included. It was clearly fun to be there; but, listened to at home, this concert comes across as only intermittently satisfying.