Early in his tenure as music director of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Antonio Pappano made some very fine Tchaikovsky recordings (Symphonies Nos 4‑6, overtures and tone poems). In August 2022, ahead of his final season at the helm (he is Music Director Emeritus from this season), Pappano returned to Russian repertoire for the orchestra’s first recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade and they bring to it all the colour and drama you’d expect.

The Warner recording is rich and detailed. The Santa Cecilia brass sound is suitably fierce in the imposing opening chords, representing the Sultan who has vowed to have his wives beheaded the dawn following their wedding night; Carlo Maria Parazzoli spins seductive solo violin lines as his latest spouse Sheherazade, weaving her stories to stave off execution. The harp, whose chords often accompany our storyteller, is clearly heard. Woodwind principals are mostly excellent (the oboe a touch pale) and the bassoon shapes the narrative beguilingly at the start of ‘The Kalender Prince’.

Pappano, master of the long crescendo, paces the action well, expansive in the second movement, and caresses the string lines in ‘The Young Prince and Princess’ more luxuriantly than Kondrashin’s reference recording with the Concertgebouw, although the fermata at fig M (track 3, 7'50") is held a little too indulgently. The finale’s storm and shipwreck are attacked with gusto – if not as frenetic as Fritz Reiner in his outstanding Chicago Symphony account – before a honeyed violin cadenza leads us into the balmy conclusion.

If only Warner had allowed us just a few seconds to bask in that stillness rather than plunging us straight into the sulphur of Mussorgsky’s A Night on the Bare Mountain! As with his opera Boris Godunov, it’s become the norm to prefer Mussorgsky’s original version on disc to the plush orchestration by his erstwhile room-mate Rimsky. Here, we get two Mussorgsky originals for the price of one: the 1867 orchestral version and the 1880 remake with chorus and bass soloist when Mussorgsky shoehorned it into his Gogol-inspired opera The Fair at Sorochintsï, a witches’ sabbath sequence featuring Chernobog, the devil of Russian folklore.

Claudio Abbado holds the brief for this Mussorgsky work on disc, recording the 1867 version twice as well as the choral version. Pappano’s 1867 version (recorded in concert in 2019) is more expansive than either of Abbado’s, teasing out the creepiness of the rugged orchestration. There’s one oddity. At fig 18 (from 10'40") Pappano employs a snare drum instead of a tambourine – it adds a welcome spikiness, but it caught me by surprise.

The choral version (from a 2014 concert) is very exciting – and swift. The Santa Cecilia Chorus are superb, really digging into the earthy texts (not provided in the booklet, tsk). Deyan Vatchkov is a good soloist, although his bass-baritone isn’t as baleful as Anatoly Kotcherga’s inky bass for Abbado. It’s useful to have both versions side by side, especially when played with as much as relish as this very fine new Sheherazade.