On Australia Day I finally caught up with the phenomenon of HD films of live performance being screened in cinemas. Just to name some of the companies involved in this venture is enough to give a thrill: the National Theatre of Britain, the Bolshoi Ballet and in this case the New York Metropolitan Opera.

The Met’s HD presentations are to be applauded not only for the actual productions featured, but also for the other elements which set them off like jewels. Continuous auditorium shots beforehand and during intervals plunge you into the atmosphere of being there. An opera singer host, here the buoyant Joyce DiDonato, introduces each phase of the performance and interviews cast and other creative personnel between acts. It all serves to humanise the experience without detracting from the opera’s impact.

The opera this time was Faust, with music by Charles Gounod. Based on medieval legend, its story tells of an aging alchemist who barters his soul to the Devil in exchange for youth, which he needs to seduce the virginal Marguerite.

Up until half a century ago this piece was one of the most popular in the repertory, its climactic prison scene as familiar as Aida’s pyramids or Brünnhilde’s horned helmet. Scenes from it even featured in one of the biggest golden age Hollywood blockbusters, San Francisco. These days it’s not staged so often, in part probably because of the large resources it calls for: numerous scene changes, a huge chorus plus a corps de ballet for the demonic revels of Walpurgis night.

The Met, though, delights in doing things big, so it’s not surprising that Faust remains a house favourite. Their mounting of this searingly innovative new production by Des McAnuff continues a trend of Broadway directors moving into opera. ( Julie Taymor , creator of Disney’s Lion King staging, also recently adapted Mozart’s Magic Flute for the Met. Opera Australia will present the production here in Brisbane this year.)

McAnuff has chosen to update Faust’s action to the end of World War II, turning the troubled hero into a physicist involved in the creation of atomic weaponry. It is his despair at the consequences of his life’s work that leads to the attempted suicide which the Devil interrupts with his infernal bargain.

The narrative which now unfolds within Faust’s pitiless steel and white cavern of a laboratory is dreamlike, fragmented. Anachronisms abound, especially in the costumes, with forties furs alongside belle epoque gowns. Out of this vision the doomed romance with Marguerite emerges almost as a study of societal and religious strictures on individual desire, played against a background of grim disillusion with war.

For me, this approach worked, for in the original setting a war context is already implied in the form of Marguerite’s soldier brother. His departure for battle, subsequent return and death at the hands of Faust give the narrative much of its external shape. Also the production’s atmosphere, especially its spare design, gives full reign to the often dark power of Gounod’s music. This is especially welcome in an opera whose myriad of memorable tunes has frequently seen it dismissed, I think unfairly, as too pretty for its subject.

On this occasion the score was served handsomely. Under the masterfully detailed direction of conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, orchestra and chorus evinced exactly the right measures of power and delicacy. Smaller roles were excellently sung, and all three principals were nothing short of magnificent.

In the case of the Faust, Jonas Kaufmann, magnificence may be the norm, but he was no less impressive for that. His tenor is unusual: deep-coloured, rich as a baritone in the lower reaches yet mounting into the stratosphere with extraordinary athletic ease. (And if his single-note diminuendo from ringing full volume to hushed tenderness doesn’t melt you, nothing will.) To cap it all, in looks the man is as darkly beautiful as his voice, and his acting can bear the close-up scrutiny of the camera as well as any romantic lead in cinema.

At the end of the Act III love scene there were actual tears gathering in his eyes as he stood beneath Marguerite’s window realising the enormity of what he was about to put her through.

He was partnered in crime by fellow German René Pape playing the Devil, otherwise known as Méphistophélès in this opera. Though essentially a cipher, Pape endowed him with a characterisation as compelling as his stentorian bass. It was impossible not to be fascinated by such suave malevolence while remaining very glad to be out of its reach.

Marguerite is not so lucky, and one felt every lash of the whip through the performance of Marina Poplavskaya. A childlike Russian beauty with intense deep-set eyes, she deployed her shaded, slender soprano with consummate musical and dramatic sensitivity. Her opening phrases, modestly declining Faust’s offer of his arm, were ravishing. Poplavskaya proved equally accomplished in the visual domain of her acting. She incarnated Marguerite’s trajectory – rapt lover, rejected woman, infant-killing mother, desperate penitent – with an inner truth that equalled Kaufmann’s down to the finest detail. The final redemption and light-drenched climb to the heavens were thoroughly earned.

The Met audience at this performance definitely thought so. They applauded Poplavskaya, Kaufmann, and the entire performing cohort with vociferous enthusiasm – until director Des McAnuff stepped forward to take his bow. Boos then began to vie with cheers. Happily, though, the cheers seemed to predominate and McAnuff may have had the ultimate victory. If anything could win over a diehard traditionalist, the filming of this production would. As near perfect a cinematic translation as one could wish for, I hope it gets a DVD release in the near future.