There have been many attempts to stage Emily Brontë’s seminal novel Wuthering Heights over the years, but the first composer to make an opera out of it was Hollywood film maestro, Bernard Herrmann. The inspiration came almost as soon as he started writing the score for Orson Welles’ 1944 film adaptation. Set to a libretto by his wife Lucille Fletcher, who supplemented text from the novel with some of Brontë’s poetry, it took Herrmann eight years. Even then, he struggled to find a producer and it wasn’t staged until seven years after his death in 1975.

Hans Sørensen’s 2011 symphonic treatment – the term suite somehow seems inadequate – honours Hermann’s hefty orchestral demands, including 12 woodwinds, 11 brass, a battery of percussion, two harps and an organ. It also fillets the opera, presenting the story as a kind of ghostly conversation between Cathy and Heathcliff, their voices fading in and out like ships that pass in the night. It’s an effective treatment, relying on swathes of grand and often haunting instrumental music to conjure visions of the moor in all its moods.