I’m all for full-scale operas that clock in under 90 minutes. And that’s far from the only good thing about Hjalmar Borgstrøm’s Fiskeren (‘The Fisherman’), completed in 1900 while the Norwegian was living in Leipzig. The titular fisherman Thorbjørn is a former success story who lost his business and son in a landslide and now can’t see much point to life. He makes a pact with the devil and offers his daughter Ragnhild to a debtor, Erik. When Thorbjørn attempts to salvage goods from Erik’s storm-tossed ship (while ignoring its drowning owner), he is rescued by Ragnhild’s lover Sigurd. Our fisherman winds up rock bottom yet again. Only God can forgive him, his family says, and it sounds from the opera’s final bars as though God comes through.

If my comprehension sounds sketchy that’s because, despite being labelled Fiskeren, this is actually Der Fischer, Borgstrøm’s opera in the original German, with no printed libretto in this newly issued but 14-year-old recording from the Norwegian Opera. The work itself may not be a masterpiece but it’s the next best thing: a thrilling, excitable, theatrically astute and dramatically tight opera, particularly so during the storm that batters the entirety of Act 2. Wagner looms far larger as an inspiration than any definably Norwegian elements, The Flying Dutchman in particular – Norway, sea spray, demonic deals, open fifths and the quest for redemption – but you hear in Borgstrøm’s score the pulsating woodwinds of Tannhäuser and some of the thick-set, chromatic brass-writing of The Ring.

We can hear the gulf between the two composers in a passage such as Thorbjørn’s ‘Ich musste, wie ich that’, which wants to take off and soar – and kind of does, just without with the lyrical freedom and character it would have from Wagner’s pen, while also giving the impression of lugging an orchestra sometimes hamstrung by mechanics. When he pulls out all the swashbuckling stops, Borgstrøm does not disappoint. I would travel far to see Fiskeren staged, and in the domain of operatic rediscoveries on a coastal theme, it compares favourably with, say, Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers: less stilted and long-winded, if also marginally less original.

The Norwegian Opera was a very different company in 2008 when this two-year recording project was started – just months into working in a theatre rather than a converted cinema. In terms of singing, nobody disappoints, even if nobody exactly wows. Ketil Hugaas strains a little at the very top of his register but also shows glimmers of real quality in the title-role, with hints of Christian Gerhaher’s burnished roundedness his helpless monologue at the start of Act 3. Similarly, for the role of Sigurd, Kjell Magnus Sandve’s tenor sometimes sounds too heavy for his lungs to lift, though his voice has an attractively clean tone. Thor Inge Falch sings an appropriately slithery Erik. There is some lovely work from Eli Kristin Hanssveen as Ragnhild, even if she lacks that last sprinkle of radiance in her big number pining for Sigurd at the end of Act 1. Without the libretto I’m all at sea with regard to the other roles, though Terje Boye Hansen has a firm hand on the tiller for an opera in which the orchestra paints the bigger pictures. First and foremost, though, a thrill to hear.