There will be few bolder tributes in this 250th anniversary year of Beethoven’s birth than David Lang’s prisoner of the state, a re-working of the great man’s sole opera, Fidelio.

First seen at the Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall in New York in June 2019 (from where this recording is taken) at just 65 minutes it is a considerably more compact proposition than its progenitor. Lang’s fleshing-out of Fidelio’s“skeleton” finds him in familiar territory: locking antlers with a ‘masterpiece’ – he’s gainfully tackled Bach, Wagner and Schubert before – to exploit its strengths and accommodate its weaknesses.

Borrowing from Fidelio and its earlier incarnation, Leonore, Lang’s libretto strips away sub-plots and secondary narratives to move the prisoners, once seen then all but forgotten by Beethoven, pertinently centre-stage. It also incorporates salient texts by philosophers Machiavelli, Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham and Hannah Arendt.

Musically, however, prisoner of the state is Lang’s alone. Pointedly side-stepping any references to Beethoven, his immediately approachable, largely tonal score oscillates between lightly worn minimalism, biting dramatic vehemence and an operatic luxuriousness lit up by moments of diaphanous beauty. If it never quite comes fully into focus (a criticism that could equally...