Sound And Vision: Bernstein: Trouble in Tahiti<br></br>Gounod: Roméo et Juliette

Mark Pappenheim's monthly look at the best classical DVDs

A glimpse into the daily domestic tragedy of a young couple trapped in a stale marriage, Leonard Bernstein's one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti must be one of the weirdest wedding presents any composer ever gave his new wife. Perversely, Humphrey Burton, Bernstein's biographer, seems to be apologising – in the 20-minute commentary to camera that constitutes two-thirds of the rather mean "extras" on BBC Opus Arte's new release – that this miniature masterpiece isn't about the usual grand operatic themes. Yet operatic expression, with its sung but unspoken soliloquies and contrary-voiced ensembles, is perfectly suited to the theme of our inability to communicate within long-term relationships. Bernstein's music is by turns zappily upbeat, zanily comic and heart-stoppingly sad. Few scenes in all opera are as poignant as that in which Sam and Dinah, following a breakfast-table tiff, bump into one another in the street and invent excuses to avoid having lunch together; or the final scene, in which they agree to go to a movie rather than have "the talk" they know they need but are too emotionally wounded to face.

With stylish musical support under ENO's Paul Daniel and strong central performances from Karl Daymond and Stephanie Novacek, Tom Cairns's new film version brilliantly recreates an idealised post-war American suburbia, as seen in the super-saturated colours of contemporary TV commercials. Cairns's clever integration of Bernstein's skat-singing "Greek Chorus" trio into the action (as office workers, household help, etc) heightens the ironic import of their jingle-style interjections.

The opera lasts only 40 minutes, and you won't watch the 30 minutes of extras more than once. So the disc offers short measure, but as marital guidance, it could prove invaluable. Not least if it stops you having to go out, like Sam and Dinah, to a "terrible awful movie" such asthe new version of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, filmed by the Canadian director Barbara Willis Sweete at a "spectacular medieval castle" not in Verona, but in Zvikov, in the Czech Republic.

Romeo and Juliet were lucky: they didn't live long enough to get bored with being married. So it's nice to know that, seven years on, Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu, opera's "golden couple", still enjoy each other's company enough to want to make movies together. But Gounod's five-act operatic version of Shakespeare is about more than its title twosome. Reducing it from three-plus hours to just 73 minutes – by cutting everything except solos and duets for the two stars – makes a nonsense of the plot and cheats us of some of the score's best music (though it also spares us having to listen to the execrable Czech cast massacring the French language any more than is absolutely necessary).

Alagna is at his best in French repertoire, and Gheorghiu sings very nicely here too. But as everyone is so obviously miming to a pre-recorded soundtrack, and Sweete's direction is so creakingly stagey, it's hardly the antidote to the supposed artificiality of theatrical opera that filmed opera sets out to be. In fact, its only reason for existence seems to be as an excuse for the Alagnas to run around in gorgeous frocks and big wigs. But then, if that's the secret of their happy marriage, who are we to stop them?

Bernstein: 'Trouble in Tahiti', directed by Tom Cairns (BBC Opus Arte)

Gounod: 'Roméo et Juliette', directed by Barbara Willis Sweete (ArtHaus Musik)