Michael Oliver wrote a convincing defence of Strauss’s last-but-one opera some three years ago, when reviewing the Botstein set, just about the time this new performance was being recorded, but he failed to take account of either of its predecessors. I cannot find as much to praise in the work, sharing theview of David Murray in Opera Grove (Macmillan: 1991) that ‘it is our last glimpse of the old, unconfined Strauss, prodigal with importunate feeling’. William Mann, in still the best exegesis of the work (The Operas of Richard Strauss; Cassell: 1964), was equally equivocal in his view of this curate’s egg of a score.

The problem lies partly with Joseph Gregor’s flat, wordy libretto, partly with the fact that large stretches of the work are concerned with minor characters of peripheral consequence for whom Strauss tries, but mainly fails, to write witty music. By contrast, he writes some typically fine and lyrical music for his three principals and, in the case of Danae and Midas, his most gratifying love music for soprano and tenor after the Ariadne/Bacchus duet at the close of his early masterpiece.

With a work that is distinctly second-best so much depends on the merits or otherwise of its performance. Here we have, as in the three previous sets, a live rendering, one based on performances of the work in Kiel. It boasts in young Ulrich Windfuhr a willing advocate for the piece. His reading is well-paced, refulgent in sound (though the orchestra is rather backwardly recorded) yet light on its feet, in that respect matching Botstein’s account.

The set discloses a tenor, the American Robert Chafin, with just about all that the demanding part of Midas calls for – a lyrically ardent voice and manner that never becomes too insistent. The Irish tenor Paul McNamara also does well in the lesser role of Pollux. If anything, the veteran Franz Grundheber, 64 at the time, offers an even more rewarding performance, as Jupiter, than his tenor colleagues, just about matching the experienced Paul Schoeffler, who sings on the old Krauss recording of the première. The stature of Grundheber’s singing and his eloquent understanding of Jupiter’s dilemma are just what the role, autobiographically written by Strauss, requires. The smaller roles are mostly well taken.

Unfortunately, there is a big disappointment in the title part. Manuela Uhl’s thin, edgy tone and unstable singing is inimical in a part, once the preserve of the great Leonie Rysanek, as the latter proved in the first and only London stage performances given by the Bavarian State Opera in 1953. Orla Boylan, on the Garsington recording, has the resonant, beautiful voice the part needs, but doesn’t suggest the allure or personality Rysanek, and Anneliese Kupper to a lesser extent on the Krauss set, provided.

None of the present offerings is altogether ideal. The Krauss, despite – or might I suggest, because of – cuts is the most authentic (Strauss considered revisions himself), but Botstein, in excellent sound and well sung all-round, is the best of the modern sets. What we really need is a studio-made version with Renée Fleming or, better still, Karita Mattila as Danae and Bryn Terfel as Jupiter, with perhaps Chafin recalled for Midas, with Christoph von Dohnányi at the helm.