Between 1913 and 1915, as the First World War began to exert its stranglehold on Europe, Franz Schreker worked on his most unremitting operatic study of the maimed and the mad. Its title is usually translated as ‘The Stigmatised’, indicating that all the main characters are wounded, damaged or otherwise flawed; doomed to strive for perfection in both art and life but also doomed to fail in that endeavour. The setting might be 16th-century Genoa but the atmosphere is entirely contemporary – or seems so a century later.

To judge from the applause heard at the beginning and end of the third act, this 2010 Los Angeles Opera staging hit the audience’s collective spot in just the way Schreker might have hoped for. Less grandly tragic than Strauss’s Elektra, less starkly expressionistic than Berg’s Wozzeck, it can’t match either of these operatic masterworks in dramatic conviction or musical quality. But – as the closing stages of Act 1 show with particular eloquence – Schreker could sometimes manage to temper melodrama with tenderness, obsessiveness with genuine humanity. As the wayward aristocratic painter Carlotta, Anja Kampe goes beyond mere flamboyance to offer welcome light and shade; Robert Brubaker has both the stamina and the range of vocal character to make the ‘ugly hunchback’ Alviano – rich but deranged, whose portrait Carlotta works on, and whose life she destroys by engineering her own destruction – more than a pathetic, cartoonish clown. With sometimes stentorian but always vigorously engaged support from Martin Gantner and James Johnson, this is a powerfully realised success for the whole LA ensemble.

Schreker’s tendency to shy away from the kind of more song-like episodes that allow the greatest German operas to achieve a distinctive kind of transcendence places particular demands on the conductor. James Conlon seems to recognise that the composer was in his element with action rather than reflection, and drives the music forwards with just enough flexibility to avoid monotony and an unfailing attention to balancing the often weighty orchestration against the vocal declamation. The ending – a strange kind of cross between Rigoletto and Erwartung – is handled with just the right mix of restraint and forcefulness.