Most surprising about this recording of Frank Martin’s Der Sturm is its being the first complete account of an opera which, while hardly a mainstay of the immediate post-war repertoire, has a reputation and an intrinsic quality matched by relatively few such works from this period. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, for whom the main role was intended, recorded highlights in the early 1960s (DG, recently reissued by Brilliant Classics), but only with this concert performance from October 2008 has the opera finally become available in its entirety.

Martin embarked on his realisation in 1952, deriving the libretto from Schlegel’s imaginative though faithful translation. The result was first heard at the Vienna State Opera on June 17, 1956, conducted by Ernest Ansermet. As a distillation of Martin’s idiom, the opera combines the serial thinking he had used for more than a decade with the rhythmic clarity and unforced lyricism through which he offset any tendency to austerity. For all its absence of vocal histrionics and its resourceful handling of a sizeable orchestra, what comes through most forcibly is the rounded and humane characterisation of its main figures – their dilemmas and uncertainties played out as an archetypal “human comedy”, where allusions to “early music” and jazz are absorbed effortlessly into a score whose 10 scenes range from a few minutes to almost half an hour, the evocative Overture and transcendent Epilogue framing the whole in fitting terms.

The cast is a fine one, not least Robert Holl’s authoritative Prospero – a philosopher anxious to right wrongs done to him and his daughter, so renouncing his island existence and magical powers – and Christine Buffle’s wide-eyed Miranda. An arresting feature is the chorus’s assumption of Ariel, its ethereally divided textures at one with the intangibility of this most elusive Shakespearean creation. Thierry Fischer secures a committed response from the Netherlands Radio forces, burnished strings and incisive woodwind heard to advantage in the fabled Concertgebouw acoustic, while the booklet includes an extensive essay by Alain Perroux. A near-definitive account of an opera whose take on The Tempest has yet to be equalled for sensitivity and insight.