Anyone familiar with the old Philips recording (6/55) of Stravinsky conducting his Oedipus rex, and Jean Cocteau summoning the audience with clipped command, ‘Spectateurs!’, will be surprised to hear the call coming from a female voice. But it works well: Fanny Ardant is not only a film star but has experience of the French classical theatre, home of good declamation. She is, throughout, classical but also personal. The risk lies in loss of the formal convention of emotional distance intrinsic to the work, but the manner suits Mme Ardant and it matches Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s approach. Without distorting the form, he allows his singers more expressive freedom than is usual. Stuart Skelton, even if perhaps more emotional than Stravinsky might have liked, brings increasing tension into his interpretation, especially from the moment of his admission of murder, ‘Ego senem kekidi’; and Jennifer Johnston takes Jocasta’s elaborate coloratura full tilt, bringing her aria off with great aplomb, but also responds gently to her unexpected marking tranquillo at ‘Ne probentur’. David Shipley keeps a more detached and firm line for the warnings of Tiresias, and Gidon Saks makes a tough Creon. (Why do performances still keep to the crowd’s notorious Latin howler ‘Vale’, or ‘farewell’, as he enters? They mean ‘Ave’.) There is good characterisation of the all-revealing Shepherd and Messenger from Benedict Quirke and Alexander Ashworth. For the most part the soloists are well recorded, though there is occasionally some change of direction and volume; the Narrator seems to have her own microphone. But credit is not done either in tone or in balance to the excellent Monteverdi Choir. They sing the farewell to Oedipus movingly.

Apollon musagète, which might have been thought the epitome of Stravinsky’s classicism, is in fact almost the reverse. He never wrote a more romantic melody than for the duet between Apollo and Terpsichore, tenderly played by Gardiner, who also makes much of the dance rhythms that naturally suffuse the score, coming close to treating the odd pauses in the Terpsichore variation as a ballroom hesitation waltz. There is plenty of verve in the second tableau, with Apollo’s variation (a good violin solo and duet) and the succeeding Pas d’action. This is a beautiful performance.