Even by his own extraordinary standards, Beethoven’s Egmont Overture is a rare and wonderful distillation of a powerful and still-resonant historical narrative. Beethoven created the overture as part of the nine-movement incidental music he wrote in 1810 for a revival of Goethe’s prose tragedy on the Flemish count whose divided loyalties led to his execution during the insurrections against Spanish rule in the Netherlands in the 1560s.

George Szell made a memorable recording of the incidental music with the VPO (11/72), with extracts from Goethe’s text and a contemporary verse precis by the poet Grillparzer woven around it. What we have here is something altogether more original: a newly written monodrama by writer and librettist Paul Griffiths for narrator, orchestra and voices. Entitled The General, it incorporates and redeploys the Egmont music alongside music Beethoven wrote for Kotzebue’s King Stephen and his own late Opferlied.

It is a somewhat Auden-like piece. A retired general reflects on a peacekeeping mission to an unnamed African country where “there was no peace to be kept”, an internationally backed charade in a war-torn land. Maximilian Schell is the saturnine, gravel-voiced narrator, Adrianne Pieczonka the bright-toned soloist. Kent Nagano’s direction is exacting and precise.

A second CD is given over to the Fifth Symphony, a repeat (for some reason) of the Egmont Overture and the three vocal numbers used in The General in their original versions. With orchestral and recorded balances that haven’t been fully thought through, the symphony performance would struggle out of context. Yet as an afterword to The General it works well, Beethoven’s vision served up urgently, even angrily, as a stinging rebuke to political inertia. “We were there to fly / A flag as blue as dreams / A flag as empty as the sky.”