This performance calls itself a “version in two parts by Philipp Stölzl (the stage director here) and Christian Baier”. It plays for 156 minutes as opposed to the 217 minutes of EMI’s 1976 recording of the first printed score of 1844 (2/92R) or the 280 minutes of a fuller reconstruction for the June 1976 BBC broadcast conducted by Edward Downes (a pirate appeared on Ponto).

That’s an awful lot of opera to be lost. In Wagner’s Rienzi: A Reappraisal (OUP: 1976) John Deathridge explains the error of Cosima Wagner and Julius Kniese’s attempt to carve a shorter music drama from the score: “they cut out or seriously distorted some of the best music in the work which, because of Wagner’s difficulty in reconciling his musical instincts with the apparatus of ‘grand opera’, stands outside the main course of its dramatic development.” His comments may be equally applied to the present reduction.

This new Berlin production follows a trope now familiar from modern stagings of the work – Rienzi is Adolf Hitler. The young film and video director Stölzl and his four-woman creative team throw the kitchen sink at this idea: no relevant filmic reference, from Chaplin’s The Great Dictator via Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will to Oliver Hirschbiegel’s recent Downfall, is left unquoted in design or acting. Torsten Kerl’s considerable vocal and visual impersonation of the title-role has absorbed, and reproduces, Chaplin’s Hitler to an almost frightening degree and even Kate Aldrich’s no less imposing Adriano, in Nazi bell-hop uniform and quiffed hair, has acquired some expressionist Chaplinesque naivety.

These references are supplemented by video-screened footage of the Nazi military and the mountain view from Berchtesgaden. The crowd scenes are dressed and played as Brechtian “epic” theatre – distorting face masks, non-naturalistic acting, deliberately clumped-up crowds. The Berlin chorus deserves applause for its plucky singing in the busy conditions of this production but its acting and movement are, without wishing to sound chauvinist, not yet the equal of our director- and choreographer-hardened British opera choruses. The orchestra rides through a rough Overture to accompany with gusto, if not subtlety. The TV filming tries with some success to mix up the (intentionally) flat-on look of the staging for a small screen.

Someone now needs to be brave enough to stage Wagner’s full musical intentions for this innovative apprentice score. For the moment this new release, the only official filming of the opera to date, provides a committed and well-sung preview of Rienzi’s attractions in a lively production.