Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s productions are often in a style best characterised as surreal naturalism. The story is not presented as ancient history: Herod and Herodias appear to arrive by automobile, Narraboth shoots rather than stabs himself. An atmosphere of Berlusconian sleaze is reinforced by Salome’s dance – more tease than strip – and her dowdy costume adds to the ironic distancing of the character as Angela Denoke portrays her; more mature than juvenile, more coldly calculating than feverishly impulsive.

The singers move confidently around a serviceable set that shows Herod’s palace in the guise of a grounded cruise liner, listing and breaking up. There are no soldiers with shields to crush Salome at the end: instead a single executioner advances on her with a knife. None of this is wildly at odds with the aggressively decadent spirit of the drama. I happen to prefer a more abstract kind of expressionism than Lehnhoff and his design team provide but there’s no denying the conviction of the performance, and the filming is suitably bold in its use of close-up, even though the frequent cut-aways to silent-film-style reaction shots are a mixed blessing. The focus on stage and singers is unrelieved: no sign of the orchestra, the conductor or even an audience, and no curtain calls at the end.

Nevertheless, the unseen conductor Stefan Soltesz makes a powerful impression and the torrid score breathes but never drags. Denoke has the measure of the taxing title-role: assuming what we have is a single, unedited performance, she does particularly well to save an extra degree of vocal heft for the final scene. Those hair-raising highest notes might not have the startling radiance of a studio-recorded Birgit Nilsson but Denoke’s voice packs in the necessary aura of manic exaltation. She is well supported by Kim Begley and Doris Soffel, who do much more than merely screech their way through their parts, and by Alan Held as a John the Baptist as obsessively driven in his own way as Salome is in hers. Not quite the ideal modern Salome, perhaps, but it will do for the time being.