Rolando Villazón sings Alfredo, opposite Anna Netrebko, in what is probably one of the finest available versions of La traviata available on video, Willy Decker’s Salzburg Festival production from 2005. Here he turns his hand to Verdi’s middle-period tear-jerker as director, in a big-budget production filmed at the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus. He offers an interesting concept, set in the ‘gaudy and sometimes deceptive realms of the circus’, a somewhat perfunctory booklet-note informs us, in which ‘false exteriors aptly allegorise the appearances and truths of the main characters’.

Gaudy it certainly is. Johannes Leiacker’s single set consists of a series of large multicoloured discs sitting askance over one another; one of them (reminiscent of the main visual motif of Decker’s production) is a clock face. A halo of light bulbs sits at the back, a cloudy skyscape intermittently revealed within it. In Thibault Vancraenenbroeck’s costume designs, the chorus and secondary characters are dressed as every circus act imaginable.

Violetta has a trapeze-artist double, who reflects her illness when she most strongly denies it, and who becomes increasingly central to the drama as Violetta herself is separated from it. Germont père appears as a kind of stony Commendatore: suitably implacable, perhaps, but also distant from the drama. It’s a world of illusion that has some effective and imaginative moments. But the ‘truths of the main characters’ remain elusive; rather than unmasking the artifice and clarifying the action, it adds too much unnecessary distraction, muddying the characterisation and diluting the work’s emotional impact.

It’s a shame, because there are three fine central performances. Olga Peretyatko’s Violetta is very well sung and acted – Act 1’s pyrotechnics don’t faze her – but the production and a lack of depth in the voice make for a portrayal that is less than ideally affecting. Atalla Ayan’s Alfredo is heartfelt and lyrical, Simone Piazzola’s excellent Germont impeccably stylish and powerfully projected.

Pablo Heras-Casado conducts the period instrumentalists of the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble with real fizz and excitement, though some might find his rubato occasionally exaggerated. It’s an enjoyable show, then, but there are more moving and more concentrated Traviatas to be found elsewhere.