Opera and the cinema might seem perverse bedfellows, but film directors from Luchino Visconti to Anthony Minghella have found success in the opera house, and the art form continues to fascinate masters of the silver screen. Only two weekends ago, Woody Allen became the latest film-maker to cross over to the lyric theatre, in a production of Puccini’s anarchic, mercurial comedy Gianni Schicchi, for Los Angeles Opera. Initial reports suggest a triumph.

Taking opera into the cinema, at least until quite recently, has been more problematic. Successful opera films can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand, but now live opera in cinemas seems to be all the rage. After Peter Gelb’s pioneering high-definition cinecasts from New York’s Metropolitan Opera last season achieved audience figures beyond the Met general manager’s wildest dreams, the rest of the world’s great opera houses have lined up for a slice of the action. The Royal Opera dipped its toes in cinematic waters last season with the showing of preexisting televised productions: Glyndebourne and La Scala followed suit. And the opening of Covent Garden’s 2008/09 season, just under two weeks ago, saw the first night of Francesca Zambello’s revived 2002 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni beamed to 113 cinemas across Britain and Europe. The performance itself had been reserved for readers of The Sun newspaper at low prices (£170 seats were reduced to £30), subsidised by the Helen Hamlyn Trust. The Sun’s marketing was brilliantly brash and tongue-in-cheek - the plot of Don Giovanni wittily headlined “Sex Pest Strikes in Spain” - and refreshingly unsnooty, but I opted to see the opening night at the Gate cinema, in Notting Hill. The audience there looked more like traditional first-nighters in Bow Street, sinking into the Gate’s sumptuous red-velvet armchairs and sipping champagne at their seats.

Antonio Pappano, the Royal Opera’s music director, gamely fronted the operation as “your host for the evening”, providing the intros to each of the acts and a recorded interview with the conductor, Charles Mackerras, as well as a live one with Zambello. Despite a couple of continuity glitches, Pappano did a fine job. The production might not have been an ideal representation of the Royal Opera at its finest - the late Maria Björnson’s darkly lit and cheap-looking sets didn’t thrive under the scrutiny of the camera, and Zambello’s chaotic blocking of the big chorus scenes looked even messier in close-up - but Covent Garden had assembled a reasonably cinegenic cast, even if it was probably unwise of Simon Keenlyside’s Giovanni to bare so much flesh at this stage of his career.

There was some excellent singing, particularly from Joyce DiDonato’s feisty Elvira, storming the stage with her rifle in pursuit of her errant supposed husband like a “lipstick pitbull”, but with a heart. The role lies high for a mezzo-soprano, but DiDonato negotiated its stratosphere more comfortably than most and made a consistently lovely and thrilling sound. Kyle Ketelsen returned as a hyper-active, darkly sardonic Leporello, while the tall, handsome young Canadian Robert Gleadow made a striking postprogramme debut as Masetto, and will surely soon be in demand as either Leporello or Don Giovanni. Marina Poplavskaya was recovering from a respiratory infection, but her singing as Anna displayed her now familiar intonation problems, raw tone and thickly accented Italian. Even the delightful Miah Persson’s Zerlina seemed below par. (She recovered some of her expected radiance in the theatre two nights later.) Eric Halfvarson boomed grandly as the Commendatore, and it was a rare treat to hear Ramon Var-gas’s big, Italianate style in Don Ottavio’s two arias, though he is a wooden actor. Opera in the cinema may not be the same as the real thing, but its availability country- and worldwide has to be a good thing. The attentive Notting Hill audience clearly thought so, applauding loudly at the end.

A better candidate for live transmission might have been the 1977 Piero Faggioni staging of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West(The Girl of the Golden West), one of the icons of the John Tooley/Colin Davis era (though Davis never actually conducted it) in the 1970s. With still-fabulous spaghetti-western sets by the late Bond film designer Kenneth Adam, this classic staging represents what, for many, opera is all about: spectacular stage pictures, teeming with chorus action and big-voiced melodramatic opera stars. Faggioni’s hypernaturalistic detail harks back to productions by his mentors, Visconti and Zeffirelli, but it is a tribute to the timelessness of this particular staging that it has been much copied, and the Royal Opera is still renting it out.

Perhaps the present cast doesn’t quite match those of the 1970s and 1980s, but Pappano’s conducting ranks with the finest I have heard in Puccini’s orchestrally most fascinating score, full of exquisite detail and inexorable dramatic sweep, despite some lingering tempi. Jose Cura’s Dick Johnson returned from the 2005 cast, in throatier voice, but still with ringing top notes. His casual stage manner and musical slovenliness remain frustrating, but he looks the Latin-American bandit to perfection. He’s no Domingo, but I doubt he can be bettered in this role today.

Pappano’s risky choice of the veteran Silvano Carroli - reappearing as Sheriff Rance in the production of his house debut 31 years ago - only partly paid off. He retains an imposing, if dramatically stiff, presence and musters enough voice, smaller now and wobbly at the top, to penetrate the orchestra, but not without shouting. The climactic Act II poker game - in which the heroine, Minnie, cheats to save the life of the wounded Johnson - inevitably lost some of its frisson, despite the efforts of the exciting Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek. She succeeds at singing this gun-toting diva with fearless assaults on the fiendishly exposed high notes, all the while capturing the naive charm of the barmaid in an all-male mining community who has never been kissed.

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