The score is as elegantly upholstered as anything that Saint-Säens wrote...Fiametta is a danced role which leaves something of a vocal hole in the middle of the work – particularly since the obligatory ballet has been cut. But those with voices sing handsomely and, happily, in a properly French style. Edgaras Montvidas is a tortured Conrad, and Tassis Christoyannis’s dark-voiced Spiridion has sulphur at his heels.

There are some dramaturgical wobbles and the score is uneven, though the best of it is magnificent…The recording itself is tremendous, conducted with infectious energy by François-Xavier Roth, and with Les Siècles really relishing every shift of colour in Saint-Saëns’s gorgeous orchestral palette. Edgaras Montvidas is a fine, empathetic Conrad… It’s immensely enjoyable, and one of Bru Zane’s finest achievements to date.

Gothic goings-on abound in Saint-Saëns’s first opera (given here in its final, 1914 version), and Roth and his period band rise to the occasion with just the right amount of Grand Guignol roughness around the edges; the plot may look forward to Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, but the manic energy of the score has more than a whiff of Berlioz, and in particular the Symphonie fantastique. Montvidas, also a fine Hoffmann, is superb as the feverish artist who strikes a devilish bargain…or does he?