Siberia was Giordano’s favourite of his own operas. First performed in 1903, it reflects the growing fin de siècle fascination with Russian literature and music, both of which inform its content and style, and indeed had already exerted a considerable influence on Fedora, its immediate predecessor. Where the latter, however, suggests Turgenev in its depiction of Russian aristocrats abroad, Siberia weaves images from Dostoevsky’s From the House of the Dead and Tolstoy’s Resurrection (Franco Alfano’s opera based directly on the latter was first performed in 1904) into a narrative that begins in relatively familiar veristic territory.

The heroine, Stephana, is a St Petersburg courtesan, kept by Prince Alexis but under the thumb of Gleby, her sometime lover, now her pimp. Unknown to both men, however, she has begun an affair with the soldier Vassili, who is unaware of her past and improbably believes her to be a seamstress. This precarious tangle unravels when Vassili and Alexis become aware of each other’s existences, and Vassili kills the Prince in self-defence when the latter attacks him in a moment of rage. In consequence, he is exiled to Siberia, and Stephana gives up her life of luxury to accompany him. Their happiness, even amid the deprivations of a labour camp, is threatened, however, when Gleby, now convicted of fraud, is also exiled and joins them there.

The score is beautiful, if eclectic. In contrast to Fedora, where the idiom remains West European and post-Romantic, Giordano relies on and incorporates Russian material. It is thought he had access to Balakirev’s folk-song collection, from which he extracted the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’, well before Chaliapin popularised it: it recurs throughout, frequently fragmented, as a motif for the convict chain as it threads its way across Russia. The opening, for unaccompanied chorus and tenor soloist, is reminiscent of the Peasants’ Chorus near the start of Eugene Onegin, and a melody from the 1812 overture, surprisingly, is taken up at one point by a balalaika ensemble in the pit. Elsewhere, there are echoes of Debussy in both harmony and orchestration, and a push towards through-composition with fewer set-piece arias than in Chénier or Fedora. It was admired in its day by figures as far apart as Fauré and D’Annunzio, and it now has an eloquent champion in Gianandrea Noseda, who conducts this performance, filmed in Florence last year.

It’s hampered somewhat by Roberto Andò’s production, which is nothing if not lavish: instead of a straightforward staging, we have a film being made of the opera in what turns out, we discover at the end, to be a Cinecittà studio. Camera crews and sound engineers drift among cast and chorus, while pre-recorded extracts from the film, projected on walls and screens, clarify points of narrative. Arias and monologues are done as artfully posed close-ups. Returning from a clandestine assignation with Giorgi Sturua’s Vassili, Sonya Yoncheva’s Stephana goes to her dressing room to change from her seamstress’s outfit into a glamorous New Look frock in order to entertain Giorgio Misseri’s Alexis. It gets really distracting at the end, when the dramatic climax takes place on screen, not on stage.

The performance is excellent, though. Noseda conducts with his familiar intensity and attention to detail, immaculately sustaining the ebb and flow of dramatic tension and mining the subtleties of Giordano’s orchestration for all their worth. Yoncheva makes a terrific Stephana with her smoky tone and passionate, declamatory delivery, spinning out silky threads of sound in her duets with Sturua but rounding on George Petean’s Gleby with thrilling heft in their last-act confrontations. Sturua sounds and looks suitably handsome, though his big, bronzed voice isn’t always ideally controlled in its upper registers. Petean, meanwhile, gritty in tone, swivels disquietingly between unctuous, seductive charm and brutality. The smaller roles are consistently well taken and the choral singing excellent. The production may be an acquired taste, but it’s a fascinating if uneven work, finely done.