The title character of Tchaikovsky’s opera Iolanta is blind but doesn’t know it — shielded from the knowledge by her father, the king.

The orchestral introduction, in a stroke of genius, features a plangent wind and horn chorus, the lack of consoling strings a powerful metaphor of absence.

“I feel something’s missing,” Iolanta later says. Poor old Rimsky-Korsakov didn’t get it at all: “Composed upside-down,” he said.

Harps and muted string quartet then invoke Iolanta’s world of longing; she’s also deprived of love, of course, again without knowing it.

Vladimir Jurowski’s handling of this music, exquisitely played by the LPO, captured the spirit of the fairytale to poignant effect.

The mortal peril confronted by Iolanta’s new-found lover, Count Vaudémont (the ardent Yevgeny Shapovalov), provides the incentive required for her cure, according to her dubious doctor (who places more faith in God than in science).

Vaudémont and a miraculously sighted Iolanta find happiness together.

Indeed, everyone leaves content, not least Iolanta’s betrothed, Robert, Duke of Burgundy (firmly sung by Rodion Pogossov), who had found himself another girl anyway, and the king (Sergei Aleksashkin suitably stern and imperious), for whom one nobleman is much the same as another.

Tatiana Monogarova was radiant of tone and affecting in the title role. Unlike Rimsky’s Tsar Saltan, presented recently by the Mariinsky, Iolanta is a fairytale with both psychological depth and captivating music.