It’s hard on Elīna Garanča that her darkly opulent take on Sea Pictures should appear so soon after Kathryn Rudge’s superb interpretation with Vasily Petrenko and the RLPO (Onyx, 7/20). With her burnished tone, effortless technique and commanding projection, the Latvian mezzo leaves a most alluring impression, even if her delivery of the text falls fractionally short of the idiomatic, intuitively illuminating ideal. Both ‘Sabbath Morning at Sea’ and ‘The Swimmer’ in particular are endowed with an imposing, scena-like grandeur, the mood almost Wagnerian in its brooding intensity. Daniel Barenboim and his excellent Staatskapelle Berlin provide consistently poised, affectionate and flexible support, nowhere more so than in the entrancing ‘Where corals lie’ (gorgeously expressive solo cello from three after fig B or 1'06"). Any nagging doubts almost entirely surround a marginal want of impetus, which I fancy may prove irksome on repeated hearings. Not a version, then, to displace my existing favourites – Baker, Greevy, Connolly (twice), Coote and Rudge – but at the very least as distinctive and big-hearted as Marie-Nicole Lemieux’s partnership with Paul Daniel and the Bordeaux Aquitaine National Orchestra (Erato, A/19).

Falstaff launches with a playful swagger and snapping vigour that really make you sit up, so it’s regrettable to say the least that what I presume to be a dodgy edit deprives us of half a bar at fig 14’s combustible Allegro molto marking (2'38"). Don’t be put off, though: there’s much to savour in a reading of narrative flair, keen temperament and striking pathos that strikes me as infinitely more rewarding than this conductor’s own LPO account from 46 years earlier. Certainly, Barenboim secures some splendidly vital, detailed and articulate playing in the Eastcheap bustle, Gadshill double robbery and ale-soaked banter at the Boar’s Head Tavern, not to mention the hapless manoeuvres of the fat knight’s ragged conscripts as they are ‘soundly peppered’ on the battlefield (try from fig 89 or 1'21" into track 11). I adore, too, those truly dolcissimo strings at fig 98 (track 12 – and such melting ppp tone for the repeat), as well as the ominously glinting splendour that Barenboim brings to King Henry’s coronation procession, whose magnificent Grandioso apex in Elgar’s engrossing symphonic scheme (at fig 127 or 2'22" into track 15) has exactly the right clinching impact. What’s more, the two interludes are memorably touching, No 2’s wonderfully tender writing for divided violas and cellos exquisitely judged both here and when it returns in the epilogue (where Barenboim most movingly caresses Falstaff’s heartbreakingly wistful final reminiscence of the young Prince Hal).

An urgently expressive, strongly characterful and agreeably compassionate Falstaff, sumptuously engineered into the bargain – but do try and hear the composer’s own remarkable recording (EMI/Warner, 6/32) and John Barbirolli with the Hallé from June 1964 (still the most poignant, insightful and life-enhancing version of them all – 12/64).