“Warning,” the DVD box declares, “Contains scenes of violence and of a sexual nature.” All true, and the camera’s close scrutiny will do nothing to ease the rapes, smeared blood and entrails. Birtwistle’s The Minotaur, another of his theatrical journeys into myth with the librettist David Harsent, doesn’t go out of its way to make friends.

Nor does the opera hurry. Composer and librettist take 45 minutes to bring on the title attraction – half bull and half man, offspring of a sexual conjunction possible only in Greek myth. Debate and exposition are all very well, especially if dispatched with the fervour that Christine Rice brings to Ariadne, trapped on Crete with the “half-and-half”. Yet when John Tomlinson’s creature finally arrives, the opera accesses primal feelings never reached in the earlier lengthy exchanges between Rice and Johan Reuter’s Theseus.

Scissoring Part 1 to match its successor’s thrust would have helped. But this DVD, filmed at Covent Garden over three performances, can only record the opera, not reshape it. Luckily, Stephen Langridge’s spare production actually suits the camera’s gaze. Sand, sea, a bull’s remains, the labyrinth’s wall of death: each ingredient easily takes on symbolic weight. The minotaur’s suffering and bifocal character also benefit from close scrutiny. In this respect, Alison Chitty’s costume for Tomlinson (his human head visible under his bull cage) proves a stroke of genius.

And no matter how gory the visuals, or how dry some of the argument, we still have Birtwistle’s jagged, often powerful score – music heaving with melancholy as much as brute force, pointedly coloured with the “outsider” sounds of saxophone and cimbalom. Antonio Pappano and the hard-worked Royal Opera House orchestra and chorus punch it out with stamina.

The sole extra item is a feature splicing together interview comments from Birtwistle, Harsent, Rice and Langridge. A wider coverage of the road to production might have served us better and pulled us farther inside The Minotaur – a striking opera, though one only fitfully humane.

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