The Sicilian Vespers, like Don Carlos, was composed for the Paris Opéra. Like Don Carlos, too, it’s better known in Italian translation; this production is sung in the original French. The staging and performance aren’t ideal but it would be churlish not to salute the enterprise of the Netherlands Opera in reviving one of the least familiar of Verdi’s middle-period operas.

The libretto is by Scribe, a recycled version of Le Duc d’Albe that he and a colleague had written for Halévy. The background – part fact, part fiction – is the hatred felt by the Sicilians for their overbearing French overlords, leading to a massacre for which the tolling of a bell for Vespers was the signal. There are clear echoes of Meyerbeer – Les Huguenots and Le Prophète – and Montfort, the tormented father, recalls Cardinal Brogni in Halévy’s La Juive.

Christof Loy updates the setting to the 1940s. At the beginning, the French, dressed in dinner jackets, sing drunkenly of their homeland: projections of the Seine and the Eiffel Tower appear, drawing titters from the audience. During the Overture, displaced to Act 2, faces of the cast are shown. As you watch, passport-like solemnity gives way first to smiles, then to images of their childhood selves; and it’s childhood scenes that replace the plot of ‘The Four Seasons’, the obligatory ballet required by the wretched Parisian taste for an irrelevant legshow. All right so far, but some will draw the line at Hélène heavily pregnant before her wedding, followed by Henri wheeling a pram.

Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester succeeds in evoking our sympathy in ‘Au sein de la puissance’. The lovers sing tenderly; but what stands out in their Act 2 duet is some exquisite phrasing in the strings. Dramatic conviction is hampered by – how to put it? – Henri’s less than heroic appearance. There are a few cuts, including the cabaletta of Procida’s ‘Et toi, Palerme’, but it’s a worthwhile addition to the modest number of French grand operas on DVD.