The more I listen to it, the more Daphne strikes me as among Strauss’s most moving and heartbreaking works: a return to nature, to an idealised Greece; an attempt to seek solace in art completed at a time of increasing barbarity. Originally coupled with the problematic Friedenstag at its 1937 premiere, it soon started to stand on its own two feet: freed from its coupling but left as a slightly awkward one-acter.

The work’s discography remains modest. It’s now over 12 years since Semyon Bychkov’s fine Decca recording joined those by Bernard Haitink (Warner/EMI) and the classic live 1964 Vienna account conducted by the work’s dedicatee, Karl Böhm (DG, 7/65^R).

Böhm was at the helm for the premiere in Dresden’s Semperoper and recorded a couple of extracts with two singers from that first cast. Those are included on the present set as a coupling for a complete recording of Dresden’s second staging of the piece, under a young Rudolf Kempe. And though this might be Vol 4 of the lavishly – if somewhat haphazardly – presented ‘Semperoper Edition’, in 1950 the city’s famous theatre lay in ruins; this broadcast comes instead from the company’s temporary home in the Staatstheater.

It’s undoubtedly an important document. Unlike Böhm, Kempe conducts the score without cuts, and he brings to it a wonderful sense of pacing, striking an effective balance between drama and Apollonian serenity. He has a fine cast of singers, too, many largely unknown today. The young Gottlob Frick stands out as truly god-like Peneios, and Helmut Schindler is an unusually youthful and bright-sounding Apollo. Gudrun Wuestemann’s Daphne, no doubt on the soubrettish side and occasionally veering off pitch, is nevertheless noble and moving.

But, alas, this release is likely to appeal only to the hardiest of collectors. The sound captured by the radio engineers is rough in the extreme, and prone to distortion at the slightest excursion above mf. The opening pages are an ordeal, with plenty of wayward tuning, and there’s a whole section where we suddenly get a layer of extra hiss. There’s plenty of stage noise, too – the shepherds’ first entry is accompanied by a Mahlerian battery of rustic bells.

The ear adjusts, though, and the sound seems to me to improve as we get closer to Daphne’s final scene, performed beautifully. But to return to Böhm’s set is to feel the fog lift, to see once more Strauss’s musical landscape in all its colour. And for all their virtues, Kempe’s ensemble cast largely can’t match the glamour of Böhm’s big-name line-up. This is undoubtedly an important document, though, and well worth exploring, not least for the generous bonuses.