If there’s such a thing as an anti-Solti Elektra, this is it. In contrast to his hyper articulate Decca set with the standard setting Elektra of Birgit Nilsson, this new recording from Amsterdam can’t compete with the dazzling ease with which the orchestra lashes out in every possible direction while Strauss constantly thwarts listener expectation, making sharp lefts in passages that imply a soft right turn.

Yet the Amsterdam set under Marc Albrecht burns at its own distinctive temperature, with a strong sense of live-performance through-line and in a much more orchestrally integrated approach: he assumes that the internal combustion of Sophocles’s revenge parable doesn’t require grandstanding from the performers. The opening maid’s scene, for example, rarely emerges with such a sense of structure as here. But because the performance does all the right things, you reach the end emotionally but not aurally exhausted.

The opera’s central trio of female singers – Evelyn Herlitzius (Elektra), Camilla Nylund (Chrysothemis) and Michaela Schuster (Klytemnestra) – are substantial but not heavyweight Wagnerians who reveal these mythic characters as people rather than demigods. Thus the magnitude of Elektra’s hatred feels more real, so much that her death becomes an inevitability because such emotional extremity can’t be withstood by mere human beings. If only Herlitzius maintained more vocal composure under pressure. Schuster maintains a certain dignity, her rhetorical style only conveying her disgust with her physical state until near the end of her big scene. Chrysothemis is the least rewarding of the roles but her stage time is beautifully accounted for by Nylund, the most charismatic voice of the cast. Being of a similar weight, however, the three voices aren’t well differentiated.

What most weakens the recording’s place among the better live Elektra sets is Gerd Grochowski’s Orestes. His voice lacks any clear sense of line, giving the illusion of changing pitch by increasing the tension in his vibrato. A better live set is the terrifying 1950 Dimitri Mitropoulos set from Florence, in which each of the three female singers has an individual rhetoric style that’s lacking in the new set. And Solti’s recording, regardless of what you might think of its tastefulness, is the best inside tour of the piece’s darker-than-dark heart.