Dramatically we’re back in the stone age. No one apart from Louis Quilico’s jester or Isola Jones’s sexy Maddalena does any acting at all. Chorus and extras hang round in ‘period’ clothes wondering how to wear and move in them. Some terrible dancing at the beginning supposedly provides lascivious atmosphere. A single up- and downstairs set, variously clad, trebles for the Duke’s, Rigoletto’s and Sparafucile’s. Brian Large’s filming concentrates on the video equivalent of selfies for Duke Pavarotti’s and Rigoletto’s big numbers. Apart from the fact that the production gives no one anything to do, there’s also the problem of how to fill in the vast amount of applause time that follows the tenor’s every utterance.

Musically there’s much to admire. This is a better audio vehicle for maestro Levine’s Rigoletto than the (later) DG recording – this is the fiery young conductor who made those thrilling early opera and Mahler recordings, caught with his homegrown orchestra in their first pomp. What a pity the stage drama nowhere matches that level. The vocalism is strong and occasionally outstanding. Pavarotti has an ideal timbre for the Duke but so little interest in what the words say. Christiane Eda-Pierre can certainly cope with both a big-house Gilda and its vocal decoration. She achieves it (remarkably) by acting even less than her tenor. Quilico’s Rigoletto is collectable and caught here when he was still in good voice – it’s an old-school performance (an honourable man dishonoured) without the devil that Gobbi found in the role, let alone the more coloured, twisted impersonations of contemporary interpreters. But it’s worth seeing and hearing. The Sparafuciles (as almost always) make much of their Act 3 scene but there’s no relationship between them, no questioning of why a man and his sister are doing these things.

In general this last may serve as a symbol of what’s totally lacking here. This still terrifyingly amoral work – in which the ‘baddies’ in power get away with everything the whole time – is boxed and packaged as a slab of poor Shakespearean period melodrama. Run in relief to almost any intelligent modern staging such as, for example, the Met’s own Michael Mayer version (DG, 2013).