Britannia waives the rules: The EU Most beautiful russian female singers in quotes’. Such was the headline of a BBC News feature on 28th June 2016. There’s a live Fidelio from March 1970, done in Italy, but almost nothing else is preserved on disc. Identikit men in bowler hats clutching orange umbrellas.

17th century be able sustain our concentration for 90 minutes? Wouldn’t most of us be feeling more dutiful than exhilarated by the end? Wigmore Street, the second moving north to Camden’s Roundhouse. The era’s beautiful, doomed queens and swash-buckling courtiers seem to have held a strange fascination for nineteenth-century Italians. The chameleonic score takes on a myriad flavours, all with a strong sense of mood or place.

Sexual and political intrigues are bluntly exposed. The frenzied whizz of a Catherine Wheel as it pushes forth its fiery petals. A harvest sky threshed and glittering with golden grain. Russian Five-inspired’ warm-up to the sequence of Rachmaninov songs – as orchestrated by Vladimir Jurowski, grandfather of the current LPO principal conductor, and the late Hungarian pianist, conductor and composer, Zoltán Kocsis – which formed the heart of this programme of less familiar Russian repertoire.