Over the years Delius’s finest, most ambitious opera has attracted three impressive recordings, none of which have fared well in the catalogue. On CD we have had Sir Charles Mackerras’s Vienna version of 1989, recorded by Decca (12/90) in association with Austrian Radio. Beecham’s pioneer studio recording of 1946 also appeared on CD (11/92), but both releases disappeared far too quickly. That each had a starry line-up of soloists seems to have made no difference. But this EMI version from 1971 under Meredith Davies with an equally spectacular cast will, I hope, lay the jinx, when it offers such a strong and colourful experience.

Central to this Swiss slant on the Romeo and Juliet story (based on a novella of Gottfried Keller) is a sustained sequence of duets between the lovers, Sali and Vreli, as their calf-love blossoms into something deeper: Davies’s inspired pacing of the score avoids any risk of stagnation – the music never meanders, and its dramatic contrasts are sharply brought out. As much as it evokes Romeo and Juliet, the plot is a variant of Tristan and Isolde, leading to the final love-death as the lovers, in an ecstatic suicide pact, drift down the river in their sinking barge.

Beecham’s phrasing may be a degree more flexible than Davies’s, but Davies is, if anything, even more passionate, as at the climax of the great orchestral set-piece, The Walk to the Paradise Garden. Mackerras, by comparison, seems relatively cool in his more reflective approach, no doubt affected by having Viennese players failing to respond to the Delius idiom as Beecham’s RPO does in both the other recordings.

Davies is most successful at contrasting the love-duets with the vigorous writing, whether in the urgent opening prelude, the quarrel between the lovers’ fathers, the choral writing in the dream sequence when the lovers imagine their wedding ceremony, and, above all, the lively fair scene. The plot unfolds with a feeling of inevitability, and the overall freshness is enhanced by the use of Tom Hammond’s radically revised text for the libretto in place of the grotesquely stilted original by Delius himself in collaboration with his wife, Jelka. Certainly restoring the original text does not help the Mackerras version.

Elizabeth Harwood and Robert Tear are both outstanding as Vreli and Sali, characterful and clearly focused (in the opening scene the role of Sali as a boy is taken by a treble, Corin Manley, against the fresh soprano of Wendy Eathorne for Vreli as a child). Benjamin Luxon and Noel Mangin can hardly be bettered as the warring fathers, dark and incisive, while John Shirley-Quirk as the Dark Fiddler – representing the spirit not of evil but of raw nature – is firm and forthright with an apt hint of the sinister. The rest of the cast includes many of the starriest names among British singers of the period, though none of them gets more than a few lines, and most are simply consigned to ensembles, an extravagance that no doubt prevents the opera from being staged more often.

The 1971 recording, with the classic team of Christopher Bishop as producer and Christopher Parker as balance-engineer, still sounds well, with plenty of body. The evocative offstage effects are beautifully handled, even if the strings are not quite as sweet as they might be. The only serious snag is that there is no libretto. Instead, Eric Fenby provides a detailed synopsis, and as a supplement on the second disc comes a talk by him, with a fascinating reconstruction of how the blind and paralysed composer dictated his final inspirations – a terrifying exercise.

Edward Greenfield, Gramophone [2/2003]