The reclusive life led by this very nearly complete opera from the early 1860s, composed just before Les pêcheurs de perles, can be put down to various factors. The accepted wisdom is that Bizet was trying to promote it just at the wrong time, as grand opéra was falling out of favour after the poor showing of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine in 1865 and before he himself had attracted a strong enough following.

Whether or not he would have come back to it after Carmen, we shall never know. Others anyway did it for him, notably Henri Busser in 1951 with a version that offended against most principles of revision as we know them today; meanwhile, Winton Dean, in his Master Musicians volume Bizet (Dent: 1975), had given the work the thumbs down in no uncertain manner, closely echoed by Hervé Lacombe more recently. Practically, the only honest support since the 1860s would seem to have come from Howard Williams who completed the unfinished orchestration of the last act in the 1970s. This version, first heard in London in 1987, is the one we have on this disc, recorded at a concert performance in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in the past few months.

So does Bizet’s shade, already bruised by what has been meted out to the scores of Les pêcheurs de perles and Carmen over the years, have a right to feel aggrieved over Ivan IV? Within limits, I would say yes. It’s always been easy to wax sarcastic about the extravagant events that motivated this kind of opera – the tugs of loyalty and patriotism, the laying of intricate plots, the mistaken identities, and so on – but it seems to me that Ivan is no worse than many others in this respect (though certainly the news of the Kremlin being set on fire is unnecessary to the storyline) and is certainly more straightforward than many, including the version of the same story that served Rimsky-Korsakov for The Tsar’s Bride.

Bizet may not have been at his best with the religious or the grandiose, but that’s a long way from saying, as Dean and Lacombe do, that he was downright bad at them. Nor do I agree that the ends of all acts but the fourth are weak. One makes allowances in a young composer of the time, and a Verdi admirer, for rather over-predictable use of the diminished seventh, but I suspect that, on stage, this opera might surprise many by its ability to sustain tension and by its many sheerly beautiful moments, notably the affecting chromatic chorus ‘Pleurons, pleurons’ in the finale of Act 2, and the two arias in Act 3: Marie’s ‘Il me semble parfois’ and Igor’s ‘Ma vengeance va donc’ (memorably sung by Janine Micheau and Michel Sénéchal on a 1957 EMI disc of extracts).

The playing from the French national Orchestra is strong and vivid, as is the singing of Ivan and the baddie Yorloff. Inva Mula is delectable when floating high notes, less so when giving them full steam ahead. Julian Gavin’s extra-bright, Italianate tenor is not perhaps what the role of Igor ideally needs and his phrasing, especially in quieter moments, is a little on the lumpy side. But he makes an exciting sound and helps nail the canard that Bizet, brilliant purveyor of wit, humour, intimacy, nuance and local colour that he was, should never have strayed beyond those confines.