Verdi’s dark-hued, Byron-inspired, compact opera about nefarious happenings in 15th-century Venice has never quite had the recognition it undoubtedly deserves. It is for its day, 1844, so innovative in its story and composition, looking forward to aspects of some later masterpieces.

Here, in a fairly conventional staging, the singers are very much left to themselves in purveying the work’s considerable import, withlittle or no personal direction. The scene is recognisably Venice, but a bit cardboard and obvious in its representation. Nello Santi, a veteran of more than 40 years in the opera house, conducts a safe rather than an exciting traversal of the highly original score.

Soprano, tenor and baritone all have splendid chances in Verdi’s most convincing early vein, but it is father Foscari who really carries the emotional weight of the piece. He precurses Rigoletto and Boccanegra in particular as regards agonies of the soul, torn between his duty as Doge and his love of his unjustly accused and condemned son. Leo Nucci, 58 when this production was staged in November 2000, gives the most telling interpretation I have ever heard from him, singing and acting the role with true feeling for the character’s interior emotions and with vocal authority, especially in his final, death scene, a downbeat close of peculiar power.

As his son Jacopo, who is torn from his family and expelled from his home city, Vincenzo La Scola puts as much as he can into his inspired prison scene given the lack of direction. His opening aria has sensitivity and a fine line, but the upper reaches of his voice now sound parched. Alexandrina Pendatchanska’s fine spinto, her care for vocal detail and dignified presence are intelligently deployed as Jacopo’s desperate wife, but – like La Scola – she doesn’t do as well as she might had she been more imaginatively directed.