Fabrice Bollon and his Freiburg forces have done much of late to re-examine the lesser-known operatic repertory, with a distinguished discography that includes Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini (1/16) and Goldmark’s Die Königin von Saba (A/16) for CPO, and Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane (1/19) for Naxos. Their latest venture is the first uncut recording of Hulda, César Franck’s ‘légende scandinave’, completed in 1885 though not performed in Franck’s lifetime: it was first heard in Monte Carlo in 1894, some four years after Franck’s death, in a much-cut version that has formed the basis for its handful of appearances since.

A curious, disquietingly bleak work, it’s a violent medieval revenge tragedy, based on a play by the Norwegian writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, in which the eponymous heroine wreaks vengeance on her kidnappers, the Aslak family, by feigning compliance but manipulatively setting each of its members against the others. The dramatic arc to some extent resembles Medea, whether by Euripides, Charpentier or Cherubini, in that we watch someone initially empathetic slowly become monstrous, as Hulda’s obsession with destruction transcends its initial purpose, her fury eventually also turning on her lover Eiolf, who, she discovers, has betrayed her, and our sympathies begin to shift to her victims.

The opera is usually described as post Wagnerian, which is not entirely accurate. Hulda’s machinations do, it is true, remind us more than once of Brünnhilde conspiring with Hagen and Gunther in Act 2 of Gotterdämmerung, and the opera contains not one but two hyper-chromatic, Tristanesque love duets, the first for Hulda and Eiolf, the second for Eiolf and Swanhilde, his ex who wants – and gets – him back. Yet far from being through-composed, this is also very much a five-act grand opéra, with a gravitation towards set-piece arias and ensembles, big ceremonials and an extended ballet, which is a not nearly as good as its counterpart in Saint-Saëns’s Henry VIII, written contemporaneously.

The conducting, playing and choral singing here are all excellent. Bollon impressively ratchets up the dramatic tension with measured inexorability: the orchestral textures, all dense strings and melancholy, sobbing woodwind, really get under your skin; and the Theater Freiburg’s choruses sound splendid throughout – the Fishermen’s chorus in Act 5, a moment of uneasy calm before the final catastrophe, is particularly beautiful. The cast, however, is uneven. The intense title-role requires a dramatic soprano in the Rysanek/Mattila mould, and Meagan Miller is not quite that. Her top notes blaze convincingly but her middle registers sound muddy, there’s too little variation in colour and she drops most of her consonants. Joshua Kohl makes an attractive, suavely elegant Eiolf, though ideally the role needs a bigger voice than his. Irina Jae Eun Park, on the other hand, is a lovely Swanhilde, and Katerina Hebelková is outstanding as Gudrun, the Aslak matriarch, rightly suspicious of Hulda’s intentions and fearful for her husband (Jin Seok Lee, suitably bluff) and eldest son Gudleik (handsome sounding Juan Orozco), in love with Hulda, and the first of her victims.

A major drawback here is the accompanying material. There’s an excellent booklet note by Heiko Voss, but the synopsis is skimpy and the only available libretto, which you have to download from the Naxos site, is an uncredited, woefully edited German version, complete with alternative translations of a number of lines, and even translator’s queries in a couple of places. It won’t do, I’m afraid. Bru Zane, one notices, are reviving Hulda in concert in Liège, Namur and Paris next year, which, one assumes, will form the basis for a further recording. One cannot, of course, prejudge the performance but the production values will, one imagines, be infinitely better than this.