Maybe the work’s title has proved off-putting to the West’s determinedly worldly demeanour but Alfano’s opera (premiered in 1904 with later revisions up until 1909) still has not caught on in the wake of our continuing investigation of the byways of late Romanticism’s self-indulgence and grandeur. But Resurrection is not a ‘religious’ work. Alfano and his original pair of librettists (only Cesare Hanau survived the journey of creation) did all they could to melodramatise Tolstoy’s novel. The spiritual journey of a young Russian maidservant, Katyusha Mihaylovna, became an Émile Zola-esque tale of emotional abuse, abandonment, accidental pregnancy, prostitution and imprisonment.

Note well that all these themes were textbook plot highlights of late 19th-/early 20th-century verismo, here carefully sifted of any confrontational realism (or serious socio-political criticism) that might offend the taste, or ticket-buying inclinations, of current operatic audiences. At the railway station in Act 2, and for the final (optimistic?) image of Katyusha’s freedom in colourful fields from the drab claustrophobia of indoor settings, stage director Rosetta Cucchi cleverly includes a young girl shadow of the main character to reinstate the element of spiritual hope from Tolstoy’s original story that’s missing in the opera.

Immediately on musical display are Alfano’s splashily colourful, if rather random orchestral virtuosity – not unlike Giordano’s almost contemporary Andrea Chénier – and his obsessive centring of the drama on Katyusha to make her into a put-upon heroine. As we know from his (albeit interrupted) work on the completion of Turandot Act 3, Alfano – as well as a dramatic use for offstage choruses, here concerning the coming of Easter Day – had almost as much of a gift for melodramatic melancholy as his hero Rachmaninov. He is also matchlessly fluent in the kind of continuous recitative – akin to realistic conversation in pace and rhythm – that carries the drama. There are few set pieces apart from Katyusha’s Act 2 ‘Dio pietoso’, almost inevitably a prayer. But it’s an appropriately atmospheric piece of stage composition, which flows together well.

Katyusha has much to do both vocally and dramatically. The production here, shared with Wexford, is led with confidence and a naturally attuned skill by the French soprano Anne Sophie Duprels, whom British audiences will know from her successes here in parallel veristic repertoire with Opera North, Holland Park Opera and other companies. She rises to the vocal challenges and is able to convey great pain in suffering without sentimentality. She seems well matched in voice and drama by Matthew Vickers’s account of Prince Dimitri, her at first faithless lover who comes to realise her qualities and surrender her to another, the fellow prisoner Simonson. A feeling that maestro Lanzillotta could press a little harder in the wordy dialogues of the opening acts, especially Act 2 at the railway station (inevitable shades of Anna Karenina), is answered by his more lively handling of the final half of the story.

The production is narrative-based and essentially realistic, more economically designed than the decorative flim-flam often thrown at verismo works in despair of better ideas. If you want Risurrezione these days, this now year-old live performance is your self-recommending choice – it’s also available on CD – unless you hunt out older Italian broadcasts with Carla Gavazzi and Magda Olivero. The leading performances here, especially Duprels’s, are worth hearing and seeing, and the work, an archetypal example of full-on verismo, is an intriguing memory of one of opera’s historic formal styles.