One of DVD’s great joys is the access it gives us to works we would seldom, if ever, see staged. After its vogue between the wars, starring the likes of Richard Tauber and Maria Jeritza, Die tote Stadt fell victim to changing fashions and snobbery about Korngold’s Hollywood career. Erich Leinsdorf’s excellent CD recording (RCA, 11/89) helped to revive it, but it remains a rarity on stage; unfairly so, as, despite its drawbacks, this performance, in first-rate video and convincing surround-sound, confirms.

Casting is inevitably difficult. As the ambiguous heroine, Angela Denoke floats her soaring lines with clear-toned security, suitably poignant in the famous ‘Song’; but she lacks the presence and charisma of Lotte Lehmann or Jeritza, or Leinsdorf’s Carol Neblett. Torsten Kerl is still less a Tauber, mellifluous enough but underpowered, too busy coping to achieve much elegance of line.

Supporting roles are fine, Stephan Genz delivering Fritz’s Act 2 song with style. The real star, though, is conductor Jan Latham-Koenig, who finds radiance and translucency in what is often dismissed as a whipped-cream score.

Unfortunately the production is less illuminating, invoking, with dismal inevitability, those cinematic associations. Marietta appears in a gratuitous Marilyn Monroe-style skirt-blowing scene (chiefly revealing Denoke’s Doc Martens and boxer shorts). Otherwise it inhabits the grotesqueries of German Expressionist film.

The setting of timeless Bruges becomes an urban gothic hell, Frank is transmuted from Paul’s friend to a Mephistophelian alter ego and Paul himself to a gibbering maniac, communing not with his wife’s memory but her mouldering corpse, flung about by all concerned with necrophiliac abandon. The score’s closing redemption finds him clawing bloodily at a door marked ‘No Exit’.

If you can see past this sort of thing, though, the opera, with its theme of obsessive mourning, remains moving, even relevant.