The second DVD in as many months to feature Nadja Michael’s lithe tour de force as the teenage Salome is as narrativebound, as uneven and, ultimately, as unsatisfying as Opus Arte’s film of the 2008 Covent Garden production (2/09). Luc Bondy has rarely managed in the opera house to equal the mastery of his theatre work and here seems to have abdicated most of the physical responsibility for the staging to the American choreographer Lucinda Childs. Childs’s touches, so startling in her 1970s collaborations with Bob Wilson and Philip Glass, here seem merely mannered – a hundred different ways for Salome to run around a rostrum, flap a veil, or lasciviously crouch. As Michael is evidently super-comfortable with all this movement, little new is added to the piece by it, apart from the slick way in which Peter Bronder’s Herod joins her in the final waltz of the Dance. Erich Wonder’s set collection of podia and windows – at least as caught on film – lacks clear direction and the costumes are the habitual mishmash of rationalised Biblical epic with modern Jews.

As in London, the individuals give the performance clout, if no especial individuality: Michael herself in more comfortable voice, Falk Struckmann’s Jochanaan displaying Wotanic tones and more than a touch of animal desire for Salome, Bronder’s appreciable Herod refreshingly un-guyed in singing or action, and Vermillion’s rather ambisexual Herodias with deep burnished tone and stacked Marge Simpson hair. The Scala orchestra plays German music most ethnically these days – Barenboim’s influence? – which may half explain Harding’s ultra-lush treatment of the score. But this looking-forward-to-Rosenkavalier approach robs the piece of bite, of its intentionally sick, decadent edge. The filming hesitates between rather than opts for close-up or distance and hasn’t solved the problem of letting home viewers into a dark stage picture. Sound and balance are pretty near ideal. There are no extras with the film. We await a gripping, modern Salome on DVD.