How do you like the idea of Boulez's composition teacher conducting Bizet? The thought might raise a few eyebrows, though Polish-born composer-conductor Renée Leibowitz - a pupil and biographer of Schoenberg as well as young Pierre's teacher - was among the greatest interpreters of 19th-century French opera. His recording of The Pearl Fishers, made in the 1950s, is an object lesson in how to do the piece, flawlessly sculpted, and progressing with a ratchet-like inexorability from the deceptively calm opening through tragic anguish to the world-weary sadness of the close.

The singing is fine, though tenor Enzo Seri is occasionally effortful, and many people nowadays would expect to hear a weightier soprano as Leila than Mattiwilda Dobbs. Qualms about vocal inequalities, however, are swept away by the overwhelming power and beauty of it all.