Gens’s warm voice and intelligent pacing lend lustre to the only female role and the male singers, too, are generally easy on the ear.

The Palazzetto Bru Zane has done Halévy’s reputation an enormous service by presenting this splendidly cast recording in a new edition painstakingly assembled by Volker Tosta… Gens, in superb voice, is dramatically convincing throughout, as though she were in a staged performance. Cyrille Dubois is equally magnificent as Gérard… Chorus, orchestra and Hervé Niquet’s conducting are exemplary. An absolutely thrilling recording

Gens is once again PBZ’s choice of heroine; her sheer distinction – poise and eloquence of tone, line and characterisation, subtle feeling for verbal nuance and control of dynamics – seems here more remarkable than ever…Dupuis may lack full maturity of timbre, but the voice is a fine one, noble of tone and free in movement, and comes notably into its own in the character’s final scenes.

The memorable melodies never stop flowing in this 1841 grand opera, which shares more than its Venetian-Cypriot setting with Verdi’s Otello (the Machiavellian senator Mocénigo is surely second cousin to Iago). Gens, as ever, is in her element in tragedienne mode (though for once she’s portraying a heroine who comes up smelling of roses), but the star performance comes from French tenor Cyrille Dubois, who tackles the stratospheric role of Gérard with mellifluous sweetness and élan.