In 1988 Alan Blyth, praising the opera’s first official recording on EMI in 1958 (with Denise Duval, Régine Crespin and Rita Gorr, and reissued again only this year), seriously doubted that there would be another. His reasonable supposition has been wholly reversed by a stream of releases on CD and DVD in the past decade; our interest in minimalist tonal scores (of which Carmélites now seems to be an important forerunner) has increased and we are no longer worried that Poulenc’s work shared a world with the beginnings of Stockhausen and Berio.

The present recording, like the recently issued DVD under Riccardo Muti, is taken live from Robert Carsen’s stage production, here in Vienna, and has been assembled from performances in both 2008 and 2011. (‘Various legal reasons’ accounted for the delay.) Given the quality of the acting cast (Sally Matthews and rising Belgian soprano Hendrickje van Kerckhove as the younger nuns, Michelle Breedt and Deborah Polaski providing weight and experience as Marie and Madame de Croissy) and their evident aural commitment to text and action, it’s a shame that this recording too couldn’t have been a DVD. We could then have seen the reasons for what Constance and the dying Mother Superior do with their voices at key moments.

I suppose that the conducting of Bertrand de Billy is as controversial in its way for this piece as was Riccardo Muti’s. No neutral restraint (or Brechtian distance) here but an earthy, folky quality – which this foreigner hears as most French – that lends a particularly apposite (and sinister) edge to the little motifs that anticipate the sisters’ deaths. If Muti pushed this score towards grand opera, de Billy brings it back to the naivety that Sister Constance represents (and Poulenc surely wanted). The conductor’s pacing and range of tempi here contribute totally to the stage’s mounting tension. The recording is effective, straightforward, quite close. This is an attractive set – especially for the contributions of de Billy and the nuns mentioned above – but I would not want to be without the Dervaux EMI original, either of the Kent Nagano performances (his ‘modern’ neutrality has its own compulsion) or the DVD of the Lehnhoff Hamburg production. The booklet-notes are not without interest but you have to source your own libretto.