Complaints first. Here’s a full-priced DVD with no extras, no leaflet documenting chapter divisions. The standard of presentation is only marginally higher than that expected from a rock-bottom DVD of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. You could also, if you wished, pick holes in the direction of Robin Lough – a little foursquare even given the restricted opportunities available when filming a live opera performance, which this is.

But after that, the joys resound. We’re in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, early in 2007, watching Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez and the rest of the crew zing their way through Laurent Pelly’s romping production of Donizetti’s military farce.

Reactions to Dawn French’s non-singing appearance as an ample and obdurate Duchess of Crackentorp will be, more than usual, a matter of taste. (She wasn’t my taste.) But there can surely be no argument about Dessay. As the regiment’s tomboy handmaiden Marie, pigtail curving, fist punching the air à la Nigel Kennedy, she shows incredible comic verve even when Donizetti’s music sends her voice skyrocketing. Singer, actress, clown: she’s all three.

Theatrically, Flórez isn’t even near the same league. Though Marie and his Tonio love each other, we never feel the couple’s chemistry (that’s one of the drawbacks of camera close-ups). Yet what is the enemy soldier Tonio anyway but a comic opera puppet? And the Peruvian star’s grin, sparkle and ringing tenor keep us happy enough. When the nine high Cs of Ah, mes amis! are hit dead in the centre with the ease of a shrug, you know you’re in safe hands. And Tonio suits exactly the singer’s still-boyish charm.

Among the rest, the shrieks and croaks of Felicity Palmer’s Marchioness never snuff out the feeling that inside the caricature lies a real human being. That’s less the case with Donald Maxwell’s Hortensius and Alessandro Corbelli’s fatherly Sulpice – close-ups never suit broad-brush make-up and wig joins.

The camera presents Chantal Thomas’s settings piecemeal, but the wit bounces through, as it does with Bruno Campanella’s sparkling conducting. It all makes you want to be in the stalls, seeing and breathing every moment.

(Virgin Classics, TMS £16.99, call 0845 6026328)

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