Monna Vanna, on which Rachmaninov worked in 1907, exists only as a 40 minute torso. Thwarted by the fact that Henri Février had beaten him to it in securing the operatic rights from Maeterlinck, Rachmaninov abandoned Monna Vanna at the end of the first act, leaving it only in piano score. Igor Buketoff orchestrated the Chandos version. Here, Vladimir Ashkenazy conducts students from the Moscow Conservatoire in a new and pertinent scoring by Gennady Belov, about whom the booklet is silent save that he was born in 1939. Ashkenazy and his forces inject considerable dramatic impetus into the music, the vocal lines of which follow the free-flowing, post-Mussorgsky pattern of Rachmaninov’s other mature operas, Francesca da Rimini and The Miserly Knight.

With the bonus of Soile Isokoski’s beautiful singing of seven of Rachmaninov’s most familiar songs, this is a tantalising disc of a what-might-have-been, Vladimir Avtomonov’s rich, fluid baritone bearing the brunt of the action as Guido with impressive reserves of passion, echoed by the soprano Evgeniya Dushina as Monna Vanna, who appears only in the last of the completed scenes. Despite not being able to finish it, Rachmaninov never lost faith in Monna Vanna. This performance shows why.