For her swansong before she quits the Grange to start a new opera festival in Surrey, the unsinkable impresario Wasfi Kani has programmed Don Carlo, Verdi’s epic pageant of counter-Reformation Spain. Admittedly, the score presented is the pared-down Italian version sanctioned by the composer 17 years after its Paris première, but this is still an ambitious undertaking and it is greatly to Kani’s credit that she pulls it off with such panache.

Gianluca Marciano is the primary asset: his astute conducting of the stalwart Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is warmly phrased and tautly paced without overwhelming the singers, all of whom need his support to overcome the considerable vocal challenges. This is an opera of grandly conceived confrontations that rises to several climaxes, but Marciano always keeps the bigger picture in mind, rendering even the bizarre last scene, with its dying romantic fall and final explosion of melodrama, credible and moving.