Smart coupling. Two more contrasting takes on Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama would be hard to imagine: the Schoenberg heated and densely woven, the Fauré cool and gently poetic.

Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra relish the post-Wagnerian hothouse of the Schoenberg: the emotive surge of the ubiquitous principal motif, the soaring love theme, the thunderous explosions of Golaud’s ever-mounting jealousy. Järvi has a great sense of the inexorability of the storytelling. This is opera without voices. He and his orchestra paint some really crepuscular colours culminating in Golaud leading Pelléas through a series of ever-darker caverns with muted trombone glissandos grimly suggestive of weeping walls and the inevitability of no return. The love scene seeks to trump Wagner on the rapture stakes – that theme might have been written by him. Excitingly overripe in every respect.

Fauré’s music – worlds apart stylistically – was incidental to an actual staging of the play in London and as such is less impressionistic in nature and temperament. The Suite offers four of some 20 numbers, and the Prelude to Act 1 and the final transfiguration of Mélisande’s death typify how Fauré’s quiet emotionalism can sometimes pack more of a punch than Schoenberg’s hectoring. Mélisande’s graceful oboe-led Spinning Song and the familiar Sicilienne (subtly enshrining Pelléas and Mélisande’s contentment) are possessed of an affecting tenderness that one would like to have heard in context.

Again all credit to Järvi’s Frankfurt orchestra for their total immersion into two such stylistically different sound worlds – a reminder, if such were needed, of music’s ability to move us in mysterious ways with the same story from different storytellers.