If recorded another day, month or year, this Der Rosenkavalier – taken from the same 2009 Baden-Baden production that has already been issued on DVD – might have been something close to an ideal live recording. This dry comedy about romantic intrigue among the ultra-formal 18th-century Viennese aristocracy has long been the artistic property of Renée Fleming and her acclaimed performance as the Marschallin. Diana Damrau (Sophie) seems to have the golden touch with most everything she sings and Sophie Koch (Octavian) is better heard than seen in the DVD’s unflattering costumes. And, of course, Christian Thielemann is the premier Strauss opera conductor of his generation. Nothing goes wrong here. But any number of misjudgements, none of them dire, are more obvious on CD than DVD.

Thielemann prefers a string-dominated sonority that, with the Munich Philharmonic, becomes unfocused, especially in light of the soft attacks and releases that perhaps give a certain Karajanesque flow to the music and highlight the composer’s constantly ingenious thematic transformations. But the sound’s lack of solidity borders on being nondescript. What should be the bustling chaos of the Act 3 Prelude breezes along without much sense of incident. The Act 3 trio has the opposite problem: it’s so overcooked that it sounds like the end of the world rather than a romantic catharsis.

The microphones catch a brittle edge in Fleming’s otherwise intelligently conceived Marschallin, whose Act 1 monologue has her musing more quietly than some singers but reaching a weighty climax minutes later in her leave-taking of Octavian. Franz Hawlata sings the oft-declaimed role of Baron Ochs in ways that lose none of the character’s comic edge. But some of Damrau’s ecstatic high notes in Act 2 feel awfully strained. And Jonas Kaufmann joins the sizeable list of great tenors who shout their way through the technical difficulties of the big Act 1 aria.

As wonderful as Koch is in other repertoire, she sounds like a Sieglinde in training here, with little youth in her dark-coloured instrument. When impersonating the simple maid Mariandel, Koch resorts to eccentric baby talk. So I’ll continue to grieve the loss of the Fleming Rosenkavalier that might have been, a project with Susan Graham and Barbara Bonney under Christoph Escenbach that was contracted into the 1999 ‘Strauss Heroines’ disc (3/00). What a missed opportunity that was.