It is difficult now to see how Sophocles’ Antigone, the greatest drama on the theme of conscience confronting authority, could have attracted performance commissions from the ultra-conservative Friedrich Wilhelm IV and swept Berlin society in 1841, but its success was overwhelming. Mendelssohn first considered adopting a quasi-ancient style for the music, with quasi-ancient instruments, but thought better of it and settled for melodrama and especially for seven double choruses with verse emphases purporting to match Greek tradition. Antigone and Creon speak in carefully measured tones, and some of the music is grave and apt. The choruses vary in quality, at their best generating a kind of dark energy, but capable of lapsing into Mendelssohn’s own sub-religious cliché. Lilting charm is hardly adequate for Sophocles’ tremendous chorus “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than Man” (in the once-standard Jebb translation drawn on for the insert booklet alongside the German text). No more suitable, though forcefully delivered here, is a swaying triple-time with a trudging Baroque bass for the great final chorus declaring that the proud learn wisdom from the blows of Fate. It is all too near the play’s surface.

However, we have been having Mendelssohn year. For the loyal, or the curious, here is a collector’s item, a good presentation of a work not without interest and unlikely to be heard in another context. The concert from which it was taken, in Stuttgart in 2004, sets this version of the play in the best light, is clearly delivered by the actors, and is eloquently sung by the excellent chorus under Frieder Bernius.