Jonathan Kent follows up his superb Fairy Queen with a gripping account of what some people consider to be Mozart’s “problem opera”. It is set in 1960, the world of La dolce vita, all scarves and dark glasses; but the location is Franco’s Spain (where the Fellini film was banned until after the monster’s death). In the context of his production Kent rarely puts a foot wrong.

There’s a geniality about his stage presence that makes Gerald Finley more suited, I suspect, to Figaro and Leporello than to the Count and Don Giovanni. But his assumption of Giovanni is completely convincing. He can be a vicious thug – no gentlemanly fencing for him, he smashes the Commendatore’s face with a brick – and of course he can turn on the charm. His most important relationship, as Finley puts it in one of the two bonus features, is with Leporello, each character both irritated by and dependent on the other. Finley’s embarrassed grins, as he tries to convince Donna Anna and Don Ottavio that Donna Elvira is mad, are a joy to behold; and his fear before the confrontation with the Commendatore in the supper scene is palpable. Finley sings as well as he acts, apart from an oddly unhoneyed Serenade.

Kent’s direction of the women is telling. Prim, middle-aged Ottavio doesn’t stand a chance against Anna’s obsession with her father. At the end, the besotted Elvira touches the corpse of Giovanni, who lies in the same position as the murdered Commendatore – a nice touch. But I think that Kent is wrong to have Giovanni humping Zerlina against a wall before her rescue by Elvira, an important feature of the opera surely being Giovanni’s signal failure to seduce anyone at all. Vladimir Jurowski chooses the Vienna version: so out goes “Il mio tesoro”, in comes the duet where Zerlina threatens Leporello and ties him up. It’s scarcely credible that nobody at EMI bothered to adapt Richard Osborne’s synopsis, reprinted from an earlier recording, which follows the standard version. The subtitles tend to the approximate. The singing is fine and the OAE play like angels.