With this release, Annunciation (1934 37) achieves its second commercial CD recording. Check out Michael Oliver’s July 1994 Gramophone review of the first – EMI’s (also live) Cologne performance – for an exhaustive and fair survey of the difficulties with Braunfels’s dramaturgy and musical setting of Paul Claudel’s ‘mystery’ L’Annonce faite à Marie. The heroine Violaine undergoes endless Job-like suffering (but with a Marian submission) as she contracts leprosy out of pity, is exiled for supposed adultery, goes blind and is then left for dead after violence from the heartless sister whose baby she has (literally) just resurrected.

If this is not already too much for non-Catholics and non-spiritualists, the fact that (as MEO points out) ‘moments of insight and mystical vision are dramatised, more everyday events, such as there are, are not’ may alienate further. The almost final stage direction – ‘from here on the stage is filled with light which gives the following an unreal character’ – may be said to apply throughout most of the action. A close following of the libretto is essential but, regrettably, BR-Klassik has assumed its purchasers have fluent German and Latin.

The attraction of the release is Braunfels’s contribution to new operatic form. Given a coherent stage production, the fact that his action is almost wholly mental and intellectual rather than physical and epic would not be a problem. His orchestration is imaginative, colourful and unpredictable. Try the great pile-up of themes and instrumental voices when Andreas the father announces his pilgrimage to Jerusalem (Act 1). Or the moment of the actual ‘annunciation’ (Act 3): the Midnight Mass bells and angel choir (only heard by Violaine) and the real arrival of the real King combine to provide an image of every element of the Nativity story. And Braunfels achieves this running climax without the über-resources of a Pfitzner or a Korngold. But is the music memorable? There’s the rub.

Passionately projected by Ulf Schirmer, the performance casts the main parts well, with Banse virtuoso in the high tessitura of Violaine, Schwarz as reliably colourful as ever as the Mother and Matthias Klink imaginative as the chief architect. The curious may proceed.