It’s taken a little while for this Salome, filmed at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale in early 2010, to make it to DVD and Blu ray, and I’m afraid it doesn’t really offer much to get excited about. A primary problem is that Strauss’s glitteringly seductive score comes across very badly. Nicola Luisotti paces the performance well enough but the Teatro Comunale orchestra is rather thin and scrabbly. The brass can be uncouth, the violins untidy; the recorded sound itself, meanwhile, is one dimensional and dull.

Gabriele Lavia’s production has plenty of stylish touches, with the floor of Alessandro Camera’s set managing to evoke both fractured marble and, to my eyes at least, a military map. The action is updated to around the time of composition, which also means plenty of military uniforms and pointy Prussian helmets, and a fair number of extras standing around with spears, waiting, as we eventually find out, to dispatch Salome herself. Jokanaan is lifted out of a crevice in the floor; after his execution his decapitated body reappears feet first, while a vast stone head rises out of the centre of the stage. It’s striking in its way but nowhere near as powerful – psychologically or visually – as what Wilde and Strauss originally called for. And most of what Lavia presents feels similarly superficial, not really adding much to one’s understanding of the characters or their actions.

Erika Sunnegårdh is an experienced and impressive Salome, and she stays the course admirably here, cutting a svelte figure onstage; her dance, complete with full striptease, is unusually convincing, often glimpsed through a vast magnifying lens that descends from above. Mark S Doss’s Jokanaan is powerful and forthright; no attempt is made to explain the character’s existence in the updated setting. Robert Brubaker’s Herod is vivid and emphatic; Dalia Schaechter matches him with her Herodias. The secondary cast, though, is of very variable quality. It’s difficult to recommend this release ahead of other filmed versions of this work – I’d certainly opt for Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s more thoughtfully and effectively updated staging for Baden-Baden, not least because of its vastly superior orchestral playing.