Before there was Strauss’s Salome there was Massenet’s – a heroine, and an opera, of quite a different hue. In place of Strauss and Wilde’s blood-soaked canvas, Hérodiade gives us a glorious Technicolour fantasy of Biblical Jerusalem, all jangling percussion bangles, perfumed woodwind and diaphanous curtains of strings. It’s heady stuff, and despite a distinctly more PG take on the story than Wilde’s, was still labelled by one Cardinal as a “travesty and profanation of Holy Scripture”. You can’t buy that kind of advertising.

The opera’s recording history is an odd one: silence for decades and then two high-profile recordings made within days of one another in 1994: Plasson’s studio account for EMI starring Heppner, Hampson and Studer, and Gergiev’s live performance for Sony with Fleming and Domingo. Since then, there have been a scattering of other accounts, but nothing of late. Step forward Enrique Mazzola and the Orchestra and Chorus of Berlin’s Deutsche Oper with a vibrant new recording for Naxos.

Hérodiade precedes Manon by just a few years, and...