It’s the best kind of logic – follow Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first Broadway show Oklahoma! with their second. This again is a painstaking restoration of the complete score – and by complete we’re talking every scrap of music including exits and entrances and even Carrie’s condescending 20-second put-down in the second act because it’s sung a cappella. And, of course (this being John Wilson), the original orchestrations (Don Walker) are vividly realised by an orchestra of precisely the size you would have heard on Broadway in 1945. Those were indeed the days.

It’s no secret at all (and please don’t yawn at my predictability) that I consider Carousel to be the finest score ever written for the Broadway lyric stage. Rodgers’s finest hour. Consider ‘The Carousel Waltz’ – not just a prelude, or an overture of sorts, but a scene-setter of astonishing resource. It is tantamount to an orchestral tone poem where all the emotions of the piece are seeded, if you like, and the audience is sent spinning into premature euphoria. John Wilson moves it along from bar one lending it an airborne imperative. There are delicious nuances like the first appearance of the waltz deftly emerging from the prior crescendo subito piano like whipped cream. The terminally sentimental among us, like me, would have welcomed a little more ‘give’ in the delivery, some old-fashioned rubato enabling the turns in the music – but Wilson is having none of it. This ride isn’t putting on the brakes for anyone.

Wilson, we know, is a stickler for text and in the centrepiece, the turning point, of the score – Billy Bigelow’s ‘Soliloquy’ (more music in this one number than in many entire scores) – the excellent Nathaniel Hackmann ‘sings’ every note that is directed to be sung. But this is one of the great examples of ‘acting through song’ and in the early stages of the number I felt (perhaps at Wilson’s instigation) that he was being a little too strict in making the singing, the musical line, an absolute priority.

Not so in the famous ‘Bench Scene’ – the conditional love duet ‘If I loved you’ where Billy and Julie Jordan (the lovely Mikaela Bennett) first coalesce. The conversational tone of the performance, the burgeoning unspoken attraction, is exquisitely managed, the gorgeous melody embraced for the wonder it is. I love Hackmann’s baritonal richness and the tenorial ring of his top notes (echoes of the great Gordon MacRae), and I love the brightness of Bennett’s tone with a hint of duskiness in the lower register. Add to that the enticing warmth of the Sinfonia of London strings and resistance is futile.

For the role of Julie’s friend Carrie Pipperidge we have the luxury casting of Sierra Boggess (Wilson’s Laurey in Oklahoma!) brightening and sweetening her sound for ‘Mister Snow’ – and what a smart idea to bring in Wilson favourite Julian Ovenden as the ambitious entrepreneur. Again his self-serving zeal makes capital of Ovenden’s brilliant top. ‘When the children are asleep’ is as deliciously sung as you could hope to hear it. Then there’s Francesca Chiejina (a new name to me) whose contralto colour lends the requisite fruitiness to Netty Fowler’s two big numbers.

Speaking of big numbers, I can never quite get over Julie’s ‘What’s the use of wond’rin’?’ and how its graceful understatement is always so devastating. So simple and yet so complex at one and the same time. Wilson and his orchestra etch in the string counterpoints so exquisitely.

Indeed it’s the stylistic rightness of the band sound that made Oklahoma! and now this so special. So much inner detail. Wilson’s signature brilliance of articulation makes everything so bright and clear – notably in the Act 2 Ballet – and always there’s that authentic string tone bedding the sound. Just listen to the Act 2 Entr’acte and the big reprise of ‘If I loved you’, brassy Broadway-sounding trumpets flaring in counterpoint. Small personal reservations aside, players, singers and conductor do this favourite score proud.