Rooted in folk song and Teutonic peasant myth, Weber’s opera with the famously untranslatable title is the epitome of German musical Romanticism, and quickly became a national cultural monument after its sensational Berlin premiere in 1821. It has done well on disc, too. In her booklet note Laurence Equilbey cites the ‘landmark recordings’ by Carlos Kleiber (DG, 12/98) and Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Teldec, 11/96) while lamenting the lack of period-instrument performances – though she seems to have overlooked the finely cast version by Bruno Weil (DHM, 12/02). In collaboration with directors Clément Debailleul and Raphaël Navarro, Equilbey conducted staged performances at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and in Rouen in 2019. Yet anyone hoping here for a complete recording will be disappointed. What we get, bafflingly, is a CD containing around two-thirds of the opera, plus a ‘bonus’ DVD of a rather different selection of extracts, including tracts of dialogue omitted on CD. Does anyone need opera highlights these days?

The Paris production garnered mixed reviews. Played out largely in semi-darkness, it doesn’t transfer well to the small screen. The Grand Guignol of the Wolf’s Glen scene is almost comically tame. Throughout the opera a dancer-juggler representing the satanic Samiel whirls and writhes behind the largely static singers. Glowing bulbs, flitting around like illuminated tennis balls, evoke the magic bullets. The stand-and-deliver chorus could be singing in a concert performance. Even today, Der Freischütz should induce a pleasurable frisson. I found this production, as far as I could make out in the gloom, by turns dreary and plain irritating.

If you confine yourself to the CD extracts from the Paris staging, you’ll hear some good singing and decent, if hardly revelatory, conducting. Equilbey rightly flags up the potential advantages of period instruments, especially the raw, rustic natural horns. While these make their mark in the huntsmen’s chorus, lustily sung by the men of Accentus, and the Wolf’s Glen, Weber’s novel, often lurid colourings are even more vivid – and more transparent – in the recordings by Kleiber (my top choice) and the more controversial Harnoncourt and Weil.

As the saturnine Caspar, Vladimir Baykov lacks the crucial black resonance. But the other principals are excellent. Johanni van Oostrum sings Agathe’s glorious solos with ample tone and broad phrasing, while Chiara Skerath, darker-voiced than most Aennchens, brings a twinkling mischief to her shaggy ghost story in Act 2. Rising star Stanislas de Barbeyrac lives up to his billing as the troubled Max, his tenor poised between the lyrical and heroic. A more truly ‘bound’ legato would have made his performance even better. As the Hermit – the opera’s human deus ex machina – Christian Immler impresses with his warmly authoritative bass-baritone. This highlights disc is worth hearing for the singing. But what the booklet dubs ‘The Freischütz Project’ is surely a missed opportunity.