If, as so many commentators have observed, The Sopranos is not really about the Mob, but about the American family and its discontents, neither is Idomeneo really about the relationship between the mythic and ­human orders in an archaic Greek kingdom. The trend in musicological writing about Idomeneo — and, it should be said, in many of the reviews of our performances of the piece — has been to emphasise the formal aspects of the opera, its heroic cast, its grandeur. This seems to me almost entirely a mistake.

Like The Sopranos — which starts with an uncle and mother trying to murder the central character, and ends with that same character murdering a nephew who has been a son to him — Idomeneo is obsessed with the wrongs, the losses, the status of children and adopted children.

How can we do our best for them, how protect them, how save them? These questions run through the opera with an extraordinary urgency from the outset: Ilia lamenting the loss of her father and brothers in the Trojan Wars; Idamante desperately receiving the (false) news of his father’s death; the profoundly moving recognition scene, in which father and son recognise each other ­after a 10-year separation, and the father, burdened by his terrible oath, refuses to ­acknowledge him; the funereal largo as Idamante enters to be sacrificed by his father, clad in white, his words “Padre, mio caro ­padre, ah dolce nome” set to music of melting tenderness.