For all the dearth of performances outside western Europe, Pascal Dusapin (b1955) is among the most significant composers at work today and it is good to see Naïve releasing this live account of his fourth stage work two years after its premiere. After a radical rethink of archetypal opera in Roméo et Juliette (1989), a many-layered approach to monodrama in Medeamaterial (1991) and a stripped-down ‘non-opera’ in To be sung (1994), it was unlikely that any ‘grand opera’ from Dusapin would merely regurgitate tradition – and so it proves.

Perelà is derived from Aldo Palazzeschi’s 1911 futurist novel Perelà uomo di fumo (what would now be called a ‘science-fiction romance’). It concerns the eponymous hero’s metamorphosis into existence, his arrival in a corrupt and decadent city – where he is first fêted as its saviour, then, after the accidental suicide of an admirer, condemned for his subversive influence – and his trial and incarceration, from where he returns to the ether.

It’s a story which resonates in the past or present, from which Dusapin has fashioned not a narrow polemic or a moralistic opera, but one rich in incident of a necessarily symbolic yet never abstruse nature – an opera, moreover, whose complex textural and rhythmic interplay are derived from relatively simple harmonic means, ensuring musical cohesion over the course of 10 ‘chapters’ which are widely contrasted in content and impact.

The opening chapter presents Perelà – created from the mothers Pena, Rete and Lama, the first two letters of each forming his name, and themselves reiterated as a kind of mantric trinity – on his way to the city, where he is accorded ‘celebrity status’, only to be knocked off a pedestal he never sought to occupy. Later chapters include a garish ball, with its on-stage orchestra and massed choir, a strange meeting with the Queen where the main conversation is provided by her parrot’s repetition of ‘Dieu’, and the magical scene in which the solitary Perelà encounters a girl with a flute – the disembodied sonorities an understated pointer to his final evanescence.

The recording, taken from the run of performances following the Paris Bastille premiere, is an assured one. John Graham-Hall is superb in the title-role, its high tessitura accommodated with little strain. Nora Gubisch is commanding as the Marchesa whose hypochondria is not unempathetic, as witness her impassioned defence of Perelà in the trial scene. Isabelle Philippe’s neutral tone is ideal for the Queen, as is Daniel Gundlach’s hectoring falsetto for the Archbishop; the remaining roles are all characterfully delivered.

Alain Altinoglu directs with evident concern for the bigger picture, in sound which, for all its stage intrusions, has a realistic placement of voices and orchestra. Antoine Gindt’s account of the work’s genesis and an interview with Dusapin are valuable adjuncts to listening. Would that Covent Garden had commissioned an opera of this quality during the past decade!