Detlev Glanert’s ninth and newest opera begins musically at an imagined confluence of the Thames and the Vltava, but the curtain rises on Germany’s Baltic coast, at a seaside hotel that has seen better days (haven’t they all?). Well-versed listeners will pick out other familiar ingredients floating in Glanert’s soup – landlocked operetta, csárdás and chorale as well as marine ingredients such as Pelléas, Gurrelieder and Herrmann’s score to Vertigo, overlooking San Francisco Bay – but the recipe is his own, and the taste never quite oversalted by influence.

The story’s origin, a sketch for a novel by Theodor Fontane, leaves room for Hans-Ulrich Treichel and Glanert to develop it in a fast-moving series of compact scenes. Librettist and composer apparently worked hand in glove, after their experience together writing Caligula (also on Oehms, A/10), and Treichel has his own experience of writing seaside operas after collaborating with Henze on Das verratene Meer (1989).

The titular heroine is a guest at the hotel, of mysterious and apparently aristocratic origin, ‘Oceane von Parceval’. Arriving with her chaperone Kristina in tow, Oceane shocks the other guests with her dancing at the summer ball but repels the advances of the young landowner Martin. A beach picnic appears to change Oceane’s mind, but the moralistic pronouncements of a sententious cleric – again, is there any other kind? – turn the other guests against her just as Martin is about to announce his engagement to her (and his scholarly friend Albert to Kristina). Oceane goes the way of Tosca, Rusalka, Senta and all the others, back whence she came, leaving behind only a farewell letter and a ghostly vocalise.

Without the benefit of Robert Carsen’s premiere staging to guide my ear – an English translation of the libretto would help – I find the many ensembles rather congested on record, but that’s no reflection on an excellent cast or on Donald Runnicles’s pacy handling of the score, which points up musical leitmotifs such as those Westminster chimes as well as subtly underlining the dramatic blueprints for its action. The opera’s crunch point arrives with an abortive double wedding, and in the hotel guests’ horrified cries of ‘Was sagt der Braut?’ (‘What does the bride have to say?’) it’s impossible not to hear the second-act climax of Götterdämmerung, led by another heroine who eventually meets a watery end.

However, all the main characters have their solo scenes and arias, and if they act and sing to type – impassive butler, flinty priest, Kristina the champagne-loving soubrette and so on – they do everything asked of them. I especially enjoyed Doris Soffel’s sympathetic cabaret turn as the hard-up hotel owner Madame Louise, bringing back the warmest memories of her Mahlerian salad days with the likes of Tennstedt and Gielen. In the title role, Maria Bengtsson commands the stage and sails over the orchestra, saving reserves of gleaming, elemental tone for a blazing farewell scene, and then the most delicate, shivery timbres for the ‘Neptune’-like pay off. Fontane was a lifelong Anglophile, and the cool beauties of Oceane would surely find a warmly receptive home on English stages.