Gian Carlo Menotti took as his starting-point for the libretto of Vanessa the atmosphere of Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales. His story is original, but the ideas that fired him can be found in the stories. One of Dinesen’s heroines lives a secluded life, and although she is beautiful, she is forlorn – ‘she knew that she did not exist, for nobody ever looked at her’. Vanessa, too, has lived her adult life waiting for the return of her faithless admirer, Anatol. When he does come, it is an impostor, the ‘false Dmitri’ as he announces himself, to a generous quote from Mussorgsky.

For an opera that is so seldom performed, Vanessa has been accorded a generous three complete recordings. This new one, recorded in London’s Barbican after a concert in 2003, has splendidly vivid sound. Leonard Slatkin draws full-blooded playing from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, accentuating Barber’s use of yearning, Puccini-inspired melodies, laced with a few nods to Berg and Strauss. The weirdest music, that for the ball in Act 3, sounds like some kind of Western barn dance, even though the setting is northern Europe.

Excellent though Susan Graham is as Erika, for once it doesn’t seem as if Menotti and Barber chose the wrong name for the title. Christine Brewer is so much in command, and in such splendid voice, that there is no doubt that it is Vanessa’s story. The one problem is that the three female voices all sound a little similar: Catherine Wyn-Rogers is a youthful old Baroness.

Anatol, surely the greatest cad in opera since Pinkerton, is made almost sympathetic by William Burden. Neal Davies does what he can with the rather stock figure of the Doctor.

But listening at home one is conscious of an awful lot of generalised mood music. The big moments make their mark, Erika’s lovely ‘Must the winter come so soon?’, Vanessa’s hysterical ‘He has come!’ and the famous final-scene quintet, ‘To leave, to break, to find, to keep’. Vanessa was the last gasp of American verismo: its Met première in 1958 was in the same season as Bernstein’s West Side Story on Broadway, and we all know what that led to.

The original-cast recording on RCA will always be irreplaceable. With Eleanor Steber and Rosalind Elias as Vanessa and Erika, and the exotic Anatol of Nicolai Gedda, it has the real feel of theatre. It is also Barber’s first version; the set under review, and the recent Naxos issue, are both of his later, 1964 revision, which omits Vanessa’s skating aria, and re-shapes the opera into three acts instead of four. I much enjoyed the Naxos set, but it is eclipsed by this new Chandos performance.