I’m afraid it doesn’t work here as it should. Principally to blame are the lack of visual clarity and the excessive subordination of orchestra to voices. It is still not to be written off, at least for the present. It seems inconceivable that the opera should not have been filmed in performance at Covent Garden or the Metropolitan: the revival was important and memorable of course for the participation of Domingo, already at an advanced age and taking this hugely testing role for the first time in his career. Sondra Radvanovsky also enjoyed an outstanding success, singing thrillingly as indeed she does here. To my mind (though, apparently, to few others among British critics) it also proved the opera to be of considerable merit, even deserving a regular place in the repertoire. And of all this, the DVD presents enough to ensure its welcome faute de mieux.

But the low-level recording of the orchestra is all but fatal to the score, where instruments and voices are interdependent in the musical sense of the whole. And the staging – or, at any rate, the staging as filmed – is full of distractions and bewildering non sequiturs; that is, when it is visible at all, for much is obscured by the so-called lighting. At times it is difficult to get an idea of the stage as a whole, as the audience would be seeing it. And when the light falls clearly upon an individual character, it usually shines upon an expressionless face, badly made-up.

Happily, this does not apply to Domingo, whose voice is also caught in marvellously fine condition. This may well be the heroic last act in his career as the world’s greatest tenor, and in the final scene especially his performance is intensely moving.