The mighty bass Stephen Milling catches the ageing paterfamilias Jeronimus's comically fallible humanity likeable…Denise Beck and Ditte Højgaard Andersen as love interests Leonora and her maid Pernille are excellent, as are the many character roles. Michael Schønwandt conducts with great detail and sweep.

Nielsen’s anniversary invites us to reassess the composer with new recordings, in this case a fourth – and successful – outing on disc for Maskarade...The new performance, like all previous rivals, builds on the strength of home casting at the work's alma mater, the Royal Danish Opera...there's a suitably towering comic monster performance from Stephen Milling.

When played and sung like this, by a cast, conductor and orchestra who clearly relish every bar, it is hard not to be swept along by the warmth and generosity of spirit of the music...All squeeze the maximum dramatic juice out of what the score gives them; they may be stock comic characters, but the feelings with which Nielsen invests them are real enough.

here’s a cast (led by Johan Reuter and Niels Jorgen Riis) whose singing brings the comedy to life under the expert baton of Michael Schonwandt. Enjoy two hours of top-notch light music and brush up your Danish in the process.