“Melodrame” – spoken drama over musical accompaniment – may not be a uniquely French genre, but it’s one that few nations have embraced as enthusiastically. Could it be this incomprehension, or suspicion, of form that has kept Stravinsky’s 1934 Perséphone all but out of the repertoire? Because the score’s ravishing, almost indecent beauty is beyond argument, as this disc by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Finnish National Opera makes abundantly clear.

Perséphone sits somewhere at the junction of ballet, opera, cantata and tone-poem – a fusion that sounds awkward, but which yields a beautifully formal, stylised neo-classical drama. André Gide’s rather heady text tells the story of...