Bernard Shaw hailed Puccini as the most likely successor to Verdi after just one hearing of Manon Lescaut. Subsequent British reactions were more measured. “Puccinian marijuana”, scoffed musicologist/translator Edward J Dent. Edward Greenfield in these pages worried about the work’s “libretto problems” but loved Puccini’s “graceful skill in feeding you increasing doses of yearning-swooning until suddenly you are slugged with the full-blown melody” in what he called, in Act 2, “the most erotic of all the great Puccinian love duets”.

The sets reissued here were recorded in Italy in the mid-1950s by top-line producers Walter Legge (EMI) and Richard Mohr (RCA) when there had only been three previous competitors regularly in the catalogues. A flood of subsequent versions – many of them off-air or filmed – captured the interpretations of Domingo, Pavarotti, Freni and Caballé. Yet, with the possible exception of the 1983 Sinopoli-led DG set (and you have to buy into his “Puccini as 1890s modern” conducting – 3/85), none have matched the charisma provided here by the central pairs. For EMI, Di Stefano is at his most rhapsodic and sensual (truly EG’s “doses of yearning-swooning”) rising to great heights of melodramatic agony on the Act 3 quayside at Le Havre or the Act 4 desert. If you want all that a degree or two more cultivated, more within the bar-lines but not a whit less exciting, Björling is in excellent voice on the rival set.

The Manons are similarly difficult to separate. Simply put, Albanese gives a more conventional frivolous girly portrait of Acts 1 and 2 (she’d performed the role onstage, Callas hadn’t) but doesn’t disappoint either in terms of tessitura or emotion in the turn-to-the-tragic of the final acts. Callas thinks herself well into what becomes, to begin with, a more serious, calculating Manon – and a very accurate Manon, too. Then, dying in the wilderness in Act 4, she produces a performance so harrowing that it should surely claim a prime spot on any fantasy best-of-Callas single disc.

Elsewhere, Perlea’s conducting is more impassioned than Serafin’s (compare the famous Intermezzo) and Naxos’s new transfer of the EMI set (from LPs, of course, not the original tapes) smooths out some of the spatial inconsistencies and “boxiness” of earlier issues but is not as present as EMI’s last 1997 transfer. I’d take the RCA/Sony overall, but that Callas last scene is unmissable.