I’m afraid Padre Guardiano’s advice to Alvaro to moderate his language (“Non imprecare”) came two hours too late for me. Forza is a wonderful opera in prospect and retrospect – we think of the Overture, the great solos and duets, the final trio and the epic panoply of wartime Spain and its people somehow surviving on a drink and a song while the doomed principals move towards the final tragedy ordained by their malign stars. But it is very long: it needs to be very well sung and, more than most, it needs producing.

In particular, the chorus requires firm, imaginative direction, and that is woefully lacking here. It is the instinct of choruses to form into lines as they did in the practice-room, and that might do for the chorus of monks – but not for soldiers off-duty or townspeople in their company. The soloists too have that lost look which means that they know their words and music but haven’t the ghost of an idea what to do now they’re on stage. Perhaps we should except the women: both Urmana as Leonora and Gertseva as Preziosilla know how to act. But for Alvaro, Carlo and Guardiano, it seems part of their destiny that they should move about looking helpless, while Melitone’s fate is that of the comic without a laugh in his script. So there is plenty for the producer to do, and very little to suggest that Nicolas Joël has done it.

Briefly of the singers: Guelfi and Scandiuzzi lack style, Urmana and Gertseva have the wrong kind of vibrancy (Slavonic rather than Italian), and Giordani hasn’t the intensity or the inner fire for the part. He does earn gratitude, however, for beginning his aria with such lyricism and restraint: and indeed he does other things well. Mehta conducts firmly but not, as far as I could detect, to any very distinctive effect. There is a much better version on DVD from the Metropolitan under Levine (DG, 3/93R).