Unexpectedly, it’s the second pair of lovers, Bella and Jack, admirably sung by Jennifer France and Toby Spence, who capture your ear...It’s the villain who almost steals the show. Ashley Riches is chilling as King Fisher, a bully and a slave to his own dark ego. For all that, this is Edward Gardner’s show, and he rises to Tippett ’s challenge superbly.

Gardner is impressive, and the orchestra here is superb and quite clearly so in the four dances, heard sometimes as solo pieces. Gardner keeps everything flowing to perfection. The chorus is loud, incisive, and fiery when it has to be.

That special fire, and its cunningly chosen cast, sets this new release above the hard-worked Colin Davis set...Gardner’s is more than warmly recommended as both reminder of and entrée to Tippett’s achievement.

The music is ablaze from the very first moments. The orchestral playing is utterly gripping...Gardner’s direction gives full play to Tippett’s stunning control of colour, enabling the performance vividly to canvass the range from the darkly chthonic to the brightly ethereal...the key to what is best here is plainly audible: Gardner’s marvellous affinity for the Tippett idiolect.

As Edward Gardner, his soloists, orchestra and choir demonstrate, The Midsummer Marriage springs from the soil, its deeply sonorous writing for voice, strings, woodwind and brass a miracle of dynamics, empathy and invention…Gardner's account is further proof that the naysayers are what they’ve always been: wrong.

Powered by the sumptuous playing of the LPO and the contributions of its chorus, the performance is charged with a special intensity in every bar.