Two generations before Beethoven set speech against music to such telling effect in the dungeon scenes of Egmont and Fidelio, Czech-born Georg Benda (1722-95) briefly raised the form of melodrama to the status of a self-sufficient genre. Writing to his father in 1778, Mozart praised Medea and its predecessor Ariadne (both premiered in 1775) to the skies, and paid Benda the sincerest form of flattery by writing two melodrama numbers into the incomplete score of Zaide in the winter of 1779.

As masters of their craft, Mozart and Beethoven (and Schoenberg and Strauss after them) understood the arresting impact that speech could make in a sung drama over and beyond the function of recitative. Experienced at greater length, however, the unwavering focus on a single character demands both submission from an audience to the simultaneously fragmentary and concentrated form – as if we had been parachuted in to the final act of a tragedy – and, at home, the closest attention to the printed libretto and translation.

This new recording scores in several respects over the competition (notably a Naxos studio recording, 4/97). Marcus Bosch’s direction is tautly phrased, very much a handmaid to the text as Benda directs. He secures sharply accented, shapely playing from the modern-instrument Cappella Aquileia, appropriately balanced to leave the stage free for Katharina Thalbach’s lamentations and imprecations as the wronged and vengeful Medea to make the fullest effect.

This is her show, after all, and the unadvertised live aspect of the performance (edited together from two concerts) makes all the difference in both Thalbach’s dialogue with the orchestra and her appeal to an audience. Even when doing the voices of Medea’s doomed sons and her former husband – Jason, who in this version kills himself rather than suffering his children served up to him at table – she digs past the notoriously unsympathetic top layers of Medea’s psychopathology to portray her vulnerability and her awareness of how monstrous she seems to others. While the album looks like short measure, any more would be too much.