It’s O’Regan’s music that really draws the attention: the choruses in particular are very fine, and his resonant orchestral writing embraces big-boned Americana and lithe Classical pastiche.

O’Regan’s music is a skilful assembly of off-the-shelf tools, techniques and tricks – entirely tonal but without a single memorable tune. His pastiche has immense style and his word-setting is excellent: even in ensembles, words are decipherable (not so much the choruses)...Hampson brings presence to the title character, his voice still ballasted and charismatic even if it betrays its age and experience.

Like John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles (which also received its world premiere audio recording on Pentatone), this exuberant opera on the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte uses the opera-within-an-opera device to tell the picaresque story of one of Mozart’s literary inspirations, and it shares some of that earlier work’s madcap energy and flair for pastiche; real-life father-and-son-in-law Thomas Hampson and Luca Pisaroni bring bags of character to their roles as the elderly librettist and his son.