Cast, band, director and sound are all top-notch, restoring Eccles’s score to its full glory...Thanks to Perkins’s deft casting, each principal’s vocalism and dramatis persona are wonderfully matched...Charlston’s Juno flares magnificently, unafraid to sound ugly when furious...The Academy of Ancient Music’s playing is just as fascinating. Perkins directs from the harpsichord with a demonic intensity.

...all of the singers are uniformly outstanding. Their voices are clear, the diction precise, and Julian Perkins leads the ensemble with fine tempos and a good sense of the early English style.

Pacing, not least in the expressive recitatives, is fluid and natural, the playing of the AAM strings tingles with theatrical life and the young cast is uniformly fine.

It is difficult to imagine greater justice currently being done to the opera than it receives here...The hero of the performance is undoubtedly Perkins, who conducts as if every bar means the world to him, pacing the work with assurance and drawing splendid playing from the strings of the AAM...All the major roles are outstandingly taken.

There’s fun to be had in comparing Eccles’s response to Congreve’s libretto with Handel’s setting from nearly four decades later (‘Endless pleasure’, for instance, is here a wistfully reflective aria for the lovelorn Athamas rather than a lubricious showpiece for the heroine, and the ‘mighty thunderer’ Jupiter is endowed with rather more gravitas), but the score is a delight entirely on its own terms. Dennis is a sensuous, elegant Semele, and mezzo Helen Charlston positively spits fire as her vengeful nemesis.

Some of the best moments fall to jealous, scheming Juno, whose scenes spring to life more readily than some of the others; the role is dispatched here with brilliant imperiousness by Helen Charlston. The role of Semele herself is beautifully sung by Anna Dennis, and the rest of the large cast is excellent, too. Julian Perkins conducts them and the AAM players in a performance that’s gratifyingly light on its feet.

This recording of John Eccles’ Semele is nothing short of a revelation. It was recorded at London’s St Jude-on-the-Hill ahead of a performance in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge with a cast that features some of the finest singers active today. Eccles’ music, a fusion of Italian and English styles, offers a plethora of brief but inspired arias alongside duets and orchestral pieces.