Recording of the Week, Meyerbeer's Le prophète from Mark Elder and the London Symphony Orchestra

An opera centring on an Anabaptist uprising in sixteenth-century Flanders may not exactly sound like box-office gold, but in the early part of its life Meyerbeer’s Le prophète was a rip-roaring success. Following a premiere which was attended by Dickens, Chopin, Berlioz and Verdi, the piece notched up over 500 performances in Paris alone, and its popularity soon caught on further afield thanks to the thrills generated by Meyerbeer’s extravagant scoring (including children’s choir and an on-stage band featuring eighteen saxhorns), the celebrated Skaters’ Ballet, and a Grand Guignol dénouement in which Münster Palace is burned to the ground.

But times change. Although the work has received a couple of outings in Europe over the last few years, Le prophète has become a real rarity today and hasn’t been staged in the UK for a very long time indeed. Given the eye-watering expenses involved there’s precious little chance of that changing soon, so all the more reason to welcome this barnstorming live recording from the LSO at last year’s Aix-en-Provence Festival with open arms.

On every count, it’s difficult to imagine this weird and wonderful score sounding better. Mark Elder clearly adores the piece and has the full measure of its rather lopsided Gothic architecture, pacing things so that dramatic momentum never flags - even in the oddly static third act, which is essentially a crowd-pleasing ballet flanked with episodes of political infighting. Big set-pieces like the Act One chorus of pitchfork-wielding rebels, the great coronation-scene (surely equal to those in Boris Godunov and Don Carlos) and the final conflagration all catch fire as they should, with hair-raising choral singing and an ideal balance between passion and precision which allows every unusual detail of the orchestration to shine through.

Written for some of the most idiosyncratic singers of the day, the three leading roles all pose formidable technical difficulties, requiring not only the heft to carry across Meyerbeer’s all-guns-blazing orchestration but also the agility and stratospheric top notes more commonly found in lighter voices. All three principals here meet Meyerbeer’s fearsome demands with near-total security, but the real marvel is the way they get right under the skin of these psychologically complex characters, whose motivations and emotional states frequently turn on a dime.

At the heart of it all is John Osborn as the ‘prophet’ Jean, a Leiden innkeeper who is radicalised into religious extremism by a trio of Anabaptists who drop into his pub and hail him as a potential cult figurehead just as the villainous lord of the manor is abducting his fiancée and holding his mother hostage. Even in the early stretches when he’s still tending the bar, Osborn’s singing radiates a calm charisma which makes this episode sound less far-fetched than it appears on paper, though there are hints of instability bubbling beneath the surface: shades of Peter Grimes, perhaps, as he rhapsodises about his religious visions against the rowdy pub backdrop. And there’s plenty of blade to his plangent lyric tenor later on, as Jean marshals his forces and ultimately becomes corrupted by the absolute power which he has assumed.

The women are equally good. Stepping in for Anita Rachvelishvili, Elizabeth DeShong is a revelation as Jean’s mother Fidès, a role which became a calling-card for Marilyn Horne. Immensely moving in her Act Two benediction on her son and Act Four plea for alms, she brings incandescent outrage to the episode where Jean (desperate to sustain the myth of his divine origins) denies her as his mother at his coronation, and is still in unbelievably fresh voice for the dungeon-scene in the final act - surely some of the most difficult music ever composed for the mezzo voice.

As Jean’s fiancée (and later nemesis) Berthe, the bright-voiced Armenian soprano Mané Galoyan matches DeShong’s firepower and ability to shift from tenderness to ferocity within a single phrase – her transformation from stock ingénue to avenging angel is brilliantly paced, and those bullseye top notes will stop you in your tracks.

Competition may not exactly be stiff, but this surely must be the new reference recording for this strange and mesmerising work: set aside three hours when the neighbours are out, crank the stereo up to max and revel in its glories.