A great Elijah should grab you even before the Overture – those sombre chords, that ringing proclamation. This recording, taken from a live performance in Munich in 1984, lays out its stall at once: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau pours out his prophecy as Wolfgang Sawallisch and the winds of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester quietly, almost instinctively, shape their phrases to colour and support his words. And then we’re off into a performance that’s charged with an utterly natural feeling for the way this music should sound. There’s a real sense here of a performance tradition, of artists still grounded in a musical culture that Mendelssohn might have recognised.

There’s already at least one well-regarded Sawallisch Elias, sung in German, in the catalogue – the Philips version from 1968. But as the booklet points out (and with full text and supporting essays, it’s well up to the standards we’ve come to expect from the Bayerische Staatsoper’s in-house label), this 1984 concert brought a remarkable constellation of artists into alignment. Fischer-Dieskau and Sawallisch are at the centre, but we’ve also got Peter Schreier – that great Evangelist – plus Margaret Price, Brigitte Fassbaender and Kurt Moll. As a final, irresistible touch, the Bavarian orchestra is joined by the Düsseldorf choir that was directed in the 19th century by Mendelssohn himself.

The result is a great deal more than merely a document of a remarkable evening (in fact the sound in the Nationaltheater Munich is so unsullied by extraneous noise that were it not for the immediacy of the performances you might not realise that this was a live recording at all). Fischer-Dieskau is occasionally a little harsh and dry at speed and up top, but the overwhelming quality of his singing here is its eloquence and its expressive subtlety: intensely alert to the meaning of the words but never less than lyrical and graceful in their expression. Sawallisch plays off that. Under his direction the Munich orchestra glow and surge but never overwhelm, and the drama moves with pace and power.

It really is a drama, too. Schreier, as Obadjah, gives his character a searching, questioning sweetness and in Part 2, as he watches over the exiled Elias, he’s audibly inspired (as well he might be) by the pathos and dignity of Fischer-Dieskau’s singing. Price is lustrous and bright, Fassbaender is gloriously vibrant and Marianne Seibel – like the two male leads – charges her part with a fierce but unflashy radiance. Even the various boys’ voices (they’re members of the Tölzer Knabenchor) have a certain exaltation about them, rich-toned and sustained. No excuses need be made, and that goes for the Düsseldorf choir, too. Perhaps they’re a little too polite to make convincing acolytes of Baal (though they roar up a storm against the prophet near the start of Part 2); and perhaps, too, a slight wooliness in the acoustic blunts the clarity of their enunciation.

But their overall sound, like that of the orchestra, is luminous, flexible and ardent. They’re a fitting part of the whole and – under Sawallisch’s direction – full-blooded protagonists in a performance of operatic sweep and irresistible sincerity, lyricism and warmth. This was clearly a night to remember, and the highest praise that I can give to this recording is that 39 years later you can still feel the glow.