Denmark is awash with homegrown 19th-century operas right now. Just as August Enna’s Kleopatra was being revived at Copenhagen’s old opera house by the Danish National Opera in April 2019 – a production that yielded a Dacapo recording (12/20) – Peter Heise’s Drot og marsk (‘King and Marshal’) was getting its first outing at the city’s new opera house courtesy of the Royal Danish Opera. The company reassembled its erstwhile powerhouse team of Kasper Holten and Michael Schønwandt for the occasion and this live recording is taken from that run of performances.

Unlike Kleopatra, Drot og marsk is frequently revived in Denmark and well known. Heise was foremost a song composer, as a testament to which Dacapo concurrently releases the first complete survey of his songs over 11 discs. Still, the Leipzig-trained Dane delivered a work of broad sweep and real dramatic power in his only full-scale opera, first seen in 1878. It weaves an imaginary story around the assassination of the Danish King Erik Klipping in 1286. The event captured the imagination of Denmark’s Romantic poets with its potential mix of mystery, history and folklore, and Heise saw in it an opportunity to exploit dramatic conflict and clear character portraiture.

I was pleasantly surprised by the opera in the theatre and the live recording only reinforces why. In a Weber-like idiom, it is long but never rambles, is full of front-footed dramatic impulse and pulls a charming narrative trick in effectively presenting events from the perspective of the otherwise-incidental peasant girl Aase. She sings one of the handful of folk songs that give the score and story a sense of place and are as fresh-sounding as Sofie Elkjær Jensen’s pearly soprano, a constant tonic even when she is railing at the end of Act 1. Jensen neatly complements her colleague Gert Henning-Jensen, a hyperactive, bright-voiced Rane. He also offers a narrative folk song, this one echoed in each stanza by the chorus in one of the opera’s most interesting and melodically distinctive passages. There are plenty of those.

What distinguishes this set – beyond the aristocratic sound of The Royal Danish Orchestra under the man who best understands how to articulate Danish opera – is the complementary casting of Peter Lodahl and Johan Reuter as King and Marshal respectively. Heise and his librettist Christian Richardt portray King Erik as a petulant philanderer, and if we don’t quite get as much from Lodahl’s vocal acting here as we did from his stage performance, he still gives the impression of a young man unable to see past his next bout of pleasure.

One of those involves seducing the wife of his Commander-in-Chief Marshal Stig, who with a heavy heart plots his revenge. The contrast between the two is as notable in the score as in the performances; as Stig, Johan Reuter sings with nuance, patience and gravitas, giving us as much sadness as fury across his oaky baritone, all delivered from the front of the mouth for the benefit of the local audience. As his wife Lady Ingeborg, Sine Bundgaard communicates her fear and pain with regal beauty and her own distinctive vocal tone, though her words are sometimes indecipherable.

Despite some audience and production noise, sound is impressive, more present than on Schønwandt’s previous recording for Chandos, which has museum cleanliness for the newcomer’s theatrical vividness. The three discs are presented in a hard box with a perfect-bound booklet brimming with production photos, an essay by operatic historian Henrik Engelbrecht and the full libretto in English and Danish. Treat yourself.