You won’t see a more haunting production of Benjamin Britten’s swansong opera than Deborah Warner’s new staging for English National Opera. It’s as shimmeringly beautiful as Venice itself, and as redolent of life slipping gently under the waves.

In Tom Pye’s sets, nothing seems substantial. Buildings, gondoliers, the boys on the beach – all are mostly silhouettes, mistily glimpsed through shifting screens and translucent curtains, and continually dappled by watery reflections of sunlight (a gloriously fiery setting sun at the end). It’s the perfect setting – seductive, illusory, enervating and impermanent – for Ian Bostridge’s stunning portrayal of Aschenbach, the emotionally buttoned-up novelist whose fatal attraction to Tadzio, the gorgeous Polish boy he spies on the beach, causes his veneer of prim objectivity to crack for the first time in his career. Even with an Enoch-Powell tash, Bostridge looks perilously young to be having a late-life crisis, and indeed death. Yet in every other respect he is superbly convincing.

His voice has never sounded stronger, darker, more boldly expressive. His diction is excellent, which is not the case with everyone in a show where ENO has ditched its controversial surtitles for operas in English. And his stage presence is mesmerising. Gawky, stiff and standoffish at first, he starts to disintegrate physically – imperceptibly at first, then to devastating effect as he claws at his deckchair like a drowning man clutching flotsam – as the taunts of Peter Coleman-Wright’s brilliant succession of sinister creeps begins to prey on his mind, and his obsession with Tadzio (danced with loose-limbed grace by Benjamin Paul Griffiths) grows all consuming.

Of course, the problem with Thomas Mann’s novella, and even more with Britten’s treatment of it (given the composer’s own attraction to a string of pubescent boys) is the nature of that obsession. It seems not just homoerotic but blatantly paedophiliac. And that has hindered, to put it mildly, many people’s enjoyment of this complex fin-de-siècle masterpiece, which seems eerily to preecho the destructive decadence that would shortly shatter European civilisation itself.

But in Warner’s hands, the issue seems almost irrelevant. Kim Brandstrup’s playfully gymnastic choreography, full of laddish wrestling and racing, is much more a celebration of youthful energy and joyous physicality (the very qualities that the desiccated Aschenbach belatedly craves) than of pubescent sexuality. And the atmosphere of the “Greek games” is immensely enhanced by Iestyn Davies’s vibrant countertenor as the Voice of Apollo.

Making a highly auspicious debut as ENO’s music director, Edward Gardner conducts Britten’s magical score – jangling with percussion and alluring harp ripples, but also underpinned by ominously bittersweet harmonies – with admirable deftness. The orchestra, especially the strings, sound as if they are playing a bit safe in Act I. But after the interval there’s much more passion coming from this pit than I have heard in a long while. Let’s hope that poor old Aschenbach’s death is another step towards ENO’s rebirth.
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