This is a beautifully produced and recorded DVD, the image glowing, the soundtrack, in stereo and DTS surround only, crisply clear. Opus Arte provides interesting extras to compensate for the awkward extension to a second disc. If this seems to start with the externals, though, it’s because there’s less excellence within.

This production, Glyndebourne’s first ever Fledermaus, was widely disliked in performance, and video offers little improvement. Not that the staging is a travesty, like Hans Neuenfels’ drug-and-incest-addled Salzburg version (ArtHaus, 7/03) – nothing so striking. Stephen Lawless offers a fairly conventional update to the late Jugendstil era, in Benoit Dugardyn’s rotating set, based on the zigzag gold stripes of a champagne label. This just about works until we get to the jail scene, which is scarcely suggested, and with amateurish effect.Lawless, moreover, rewrites the dialogue with leaden indifference to wit and timing, padding it out with feeble jokes which are not improved by being retranslated into German, delivered by mostly non-German singers and hammered home with the lumpen insistence that bedevils the action. And while some of his ideas sound promising – Adele shy and victimised instead of pert, Orlovsky’s party starting very formal and only gradually hotting up – in practice they deaden the effect further. The result is as stale and sparkle-free as morning-after champagne.

This is a shame, because although the musical side isn’t perfect, there’s still a lot of brio. Pamela Armstrong is a first-rate Rosalinde, soaring through the Czárdas with steely virtuosity and more charm than Lawless’s strident characterisation allows. Likewise, Lyubov Petrova’s creamy-voiced Adele, much too reticent compared to the delightful Hildegarde Heichele on the Covent Garden recording. Malena Ernman is a fine Orlovsky, lighter-voiced than Brigitte Fassbaender on Kleiber’s classic DVD, but elegant and, with a Grieg-like moustache, unusually convincing – until she’s made to reveal herself as a woman, to Adele’s understandable dismay.

The men are not so good, however. Thomas Allen’s experienced Eisenstein sounds sadly somewhat tired in the tenor range and looks too old for such antics, especially in Lawless’s grumpy characterisation. Håkan Hakegård is equally lacklustre as Falke, his genial persona reduced to an alienated old Dr Mabuse-style intriguer. Almost as creepy is Pär Lindskog’s passionless Alfred; one can’t imagine any woman aroused by this pallid delivery. That characterful bass Artur Korn makes half the impact he could as Frank, as to does veteran Ragnar Ulfung (in an inappropriate British barrister’s wig!). DVD renders Frosch’s obtrusive champagne monologue mercifully optional.

Which leaves Vladimir Jurowski’s conducting. And sadly, in the wake of much else, this is brilliant. Clearly he reveres the score, delivering wit and waltzes with the idiomatic Schwung that evades Domingo, for all his sprightliness, at Covent Garden, and, with some superb orchestral playing, a clarity of texture to rival Kleiber.

Jurowski sounds a little richer, Kleiber somewhat crisper, but these are mere shades. What counts is that Kleiber and Domingo both boast superior casts and much better stagings, particularly Covent Garden’s cheerful polyglot romp. Either is greatly preferable.