Modern production-hater and musical conservative Riccardo Muti must have thought he was in seventh heaven when he discovered a staging of a tonal 1950s opera that was (a) set in the historical period in which it was set and (b) put most of the cast downstage facing the conductor all the time.

But that isn’t to denigrate Robert Carsen’s minimalist, rather Wieland Wagner-esque production of Poulenc’s tragedy. True, until the final mass guillotining scene, little out of the ordinary and naturalistic happens, except that there is no scenery save essential chairs and benches, not even a crucifix. Scene changes and atmosphere are created wholly through Jean Kalman’s state-of-the-art lighting of a large, bare stage space surrounded by black masking and by Carsen’s detailed, realistic direction of the singing actors. If anything, Muti’s contribution is the more radical – or, at least, unusual. In his understandable urge to vary as much as possible the pace and dynamics of a score that can seem like an endless ocean of recitative, he sometimes pushes Poulenc’s deliberately simple (but never simplistic) writing to points of hysteria that more suggest Stravinsky or Bartók. It’s a view, and mostly it works – although the price of trailing the sisters’ doom by pointing up the guillotine leitmotif in the music so strongly in the first Blanche/Constance duet in Act 1 (and other similar anticipations) is the undercutting of the score’s long-term dramatic suspense. The cast are superb. There can have been few who have not made much of Madame de Croissy in this work’s stage history, and Anja Silja delivers a performance every bit as concentrated as her Sentas, Leonores and Emilia Martys. It’s quite frightening when she rises from her death bed. As the major novice sisters, Dagmar Schellenberger and Laura Aikin are in exceptional voice and focus.

Sound and vision in this remastered reissue of a 2004 telecast are unfussily matched to Carsen’s production. One grouse: the whole of the final scene is in Latin. Do ArtHaus’s subtitlers assume that we speak that language but not the French of the rest of the piece? And that final scene onstage? Well, no guillotines are on view…