Perhaps more than ever, this Ariadne auf Naxos presents an operatic evening of two halves. Katharina Thoma’s production moves the action of the Prologue to an English country house in the early 1940s – the nod to Glyndebourne itself is unmistakable. For the opera itself, though, the house has become an improvised hospital, the Luftwaffe having brought the Prologue to a close with a bomb attack. Out goes the opera-within-an-opera, and Ariadne becomes a shell-shocked patient waiting for her fighter-ace Bacchus. The Composer, meanwhile, stays onstage throughout, nervously puffing cigarettes and referring back to his score – learning, as Thoma reveals in the booklet interview, from what he’s witnessing.

The idea is executed well, and there are plenty of nicely detailed directorial touches and period costumes, as well as some less welcome gags. The result, though, is fundamentally incoherent, with the opera becoming a wartime romance rather than the profound but fleet-footed meditation on loss and renewal it should be.

Matters aren’t helped by the fact that Soile Isokoski would clearly be more at home in a more traditional production, and here struggles to produce anything but generalised acting. The voice is its usual refined self but is not a natural fit for the considerable requirements of the role. Laura Claycomb’s pin-up Zerbinetta is lively and pert but the voice is a little short on precision and clarity as it goes up the range. Kate Lindsey’s Composer is beautifully detailed, and, though a mezzo, her voice has a soprano-like colour and ease. Thomas Allen’s Music-Master is excellent, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s Dancing Master shamelessly over-the-top and Dmitri Vargin’s Harlekin pleasingly lyrical. There are fine performances from the rest of the cast – though Sergey Skorokhodov’s heroic Bacchus tires noticeably towards the end.

Vladimir Jurowski draws clean and elegantly virtuoso playing from the LPO but tends too much towards swift efficiency. The technical quality of the film and sound is excellent but I’d stick with Claus Guth’s Zurich production for an Ariadne with Konzept, and Filippo Sanjust’s quaint but still effective Vienna film for one without.