Here’s just a small part of the riveting ‘back story’ of this never-quite-forgotten Australian composer (1912 90). A student of Arthur Benjamin, Constant Lambert, Malcolm Sargent and Vaughan Williams at London’s Royal College of Music in the 1930s, Peggy Glanville-Hicks claimed that RVW stole the wrenching discord opening of his Fourth Symphony from her – and placed it in a later opera of hers to show the world. She became a US citizen, wrote criticism for the New York Herald Tribune, recovered from blindness, went to live in Greece and worked on operas (Nausicaa and Sappho, her last) with Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell. And…

Sappho was snottily rejected by Kurt Adler for a 1963 San Francisco commission to star Maria Callas (who else?) because it had ‘an abundant use of modal tonality’ and its ‘dramatic timing was not acceptable’. Fifty years later the work (or the majority of it) turns up in a recording starrily cast with Polaski, Tomlinson, Koch, Trekel et al, fluently conducted and prepared by Jennifer Condon (and not forgetting Eilene Hannan as language coach). Some comeback, wholly typical of Glanville-Hicks’s Midas-touch life.

On a first to third listening, Sappho – based on Durrell’s play of the same name and Bliss Carman’s Sappho: 100 Lyrics – may not be (yet) a lost masterpiece. But it is certainly a massively professional piece of composition whose dramatic timing, pace SFO, keeps a fine balance between local detail and mainline plotting, a strong (final) Act 1 duet for heroine Sappho and soulmate Phaon and a farewell scene (Act 3) for Sappho, emotionally not unlike the end of Strauss’s Daphne. What does it all sound like? Like a tonal opera of the 1930s, quite a lot of VW, some Martin≤, a touch of Bartók, what I would call ‘natural’ vocal writing.

The recording, at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon last summer, clearly established its own atmosphere – Polaski especially sets to with a will, the tessitura suiting her voice well. For reasons not yet clear to me (and a booklet explanation eludes me) we don’t have the first two scenes of Act 2 or the first five of Act 3. Do sample if you can; and it feels like a piece that would stage well.