Commissioned in 1963 by San Francisco Opera as a vehicle for Maria Callas, Peggy Glanville-Hicks’s last grand opera Sappho never saw the light of day, rejected on the grounds of “unacceptable dramatic timing” and a surfeit of “modal tonality”. It was thus spared the fate of Walton’s Troilus and Cressida and Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, two dangerously tonal operas that flopped in a musical world where the avant-garde was on the up and up. We have young Australian conductor and impresario Jennifer Condon to thank for deciphering the manuscripts and bringing this important work into the recording studio, just scraping into Glanville-Hicks’s 2012 centenary. Her silver tongue has even coaxed this particularly starry cast to give of their art for the sheer love of the music!

For her second ancient Greek opera, Glanville-Hicks adapted a verse play by Lawrence Durrell, collaborating first by correspondence and subsequently at her home in Athens. Sappho, then, is blessed with a beautifully poetic libretto, packed with memorable phrases and singable lines. The plot is cursed with a lack of forward momentum, but what it lacks in dramatic impetus it makes up for in meditative insight. Ironically, Durrell’s Sappho doesn’t chase the young maidens but...