I have a little list of Gurrelieder recordings burdened by an uningratiating effort at the central role of King Waldemar (Paul Althouse for Stokowski, Herbert Schachtschneider for Kubelík at the top of it in chronological and perhaps musical order), and this one, in many other ways valuable, must join them. To hear Stig Andersen even in slightly freer and more sustained voice at the start of Part 3, followed by the strength and sap of Andreas Conrad’s Klaus, is to be reminded of those all-too-familiar evenings when you wish Siegfried and Mime would swap costumes and give everyone concerned a break.

Would it, then, be missed? I think so. The engineers have also had to do their bit for Soile Isokoski – she is no Sieglinde – but she never puts her voice under pressure even when top B flats are called for, and she is more realistically “Tove-lille”, a young mistress to a king, shy and ardent then basking in glory, than several sopranos on record who might more convincingly have auditioned for the silent part of the slighted queen with murder in mind. Monica Groop’s Wood-Dove flies over the orchestra rather than emerging from within it as Isokoski and Andersen do, most of the time, but she laments too much too soon: there is some want of deepening woe and pity at the refrain of “Weit flog ich”.

The Signum engineers have performed miracles to match and convey those of Schoenberg’s prodigious orchestration. The 90 male voices divided by 16 parts in the Wild Hunt is around a third the number that Schoenberg had in mind but they are a convincingly rowdier bunch than Ozawa’s Tanglewood Festival Chorus at almost the same hectic stampede, without ever raising the unholy racket of Rattle’s vassals on EMI (see page 48 for the Gurrelieder Collection). Those who agreed with Michael Oliver about Barbara Sukowa’s “coy and exaggerated howling” on Abbado’s recording will enjoy her no more here. I find her interpretation entirely within the spirit of the part and its Sprechstimme writing, if not the letter, and no one else greets the final sunrise so ecstatically.

Nor need the Philharmonia fear competition: they play superbly, without the weight of central European counterparts but with no less power at the highly rhetorical closures of each part. Salonen is the first to record the revised (2007) Universal Edition of the score, and more diligent than most in his observance of Schoenberg’s detailed expressive markings as well as being ready to expand on them, broadening here and there to mixed effect. No one makes more of the crescendo for tenor drum on the last chord of Part 2 that forges yet another Wagnerian kinship, with the end of the second act of Parsifal.