Here’s a rarity: the first and (as far as I can ascertain) only recording of Venus in Africa, an opera by that pistol-toting, torpedo-inventing ‘bad boy of music’ George Antheil. And yet the Antheil we encounter in this bubbly one-act romcom isn’t particularly wicked at all. Playful, yes. Mischievous, certainly – and tender, too, at times. But the most startling thing about Venus in Africa is its date of composition: 1954, just a few years before Antheil’s death. You’d swear that this sunny score, with its splashes of bitonality and syncopated dance rhythms, was a product of Paris in the 1920s – the milieu of Les Six, through which a younger, angrier Antheil had cut a provocative swathe.

Antheil and his librettist, the Hollywood screenwriter Michael Dyne, recapture that carefree, youthful era to perfection. The setting is a tourist trap on the coast of North Africa and Yvonne (‘an attractive young girl’) and Charles (‘an attractive young man’) are having a lovers’ tiff. He thinks she’s unreasonable, she finds him insensitive and can’t believe she’s given up her previous boyfriend and (more importantly) her dog for him. A rift seems certain, but their hotel, it transpires, was built on the site of a Roman temple to Venus – and the young woman that the jilted Charles encounters at the next table seems to know a surprising amount about the laws of love. According to the booklet notes (and hallelujah! CPO provides a complete libretto), the young Antheil had a not dissimilar encounter prior to his own marriage.

I’ve probably given away enough; but although there’s certainly a sprinkling of philosophy in Dyne’s zesty libretto (and fans of Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City might find themselves smiling at some of the stage directions), the real joy is the journey. In Antheil’s hands it bustles along, quoting Strauss’s Perpetuum mobile and Milhaud’s ‘Brazileira’ in its pursuit of a cheerful, Mediterranean energy tilting over, at times, into a lyrical, bittersweet yearning: just enough to suggest that the emotional stakes are real. Think Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, but less cynical; or Poulenc’s Les mamelles de Tirésias, but with more heart.

Although there are five named characters, Venus in Africa is effectively a three-hander, and the principal singers get around the English text nimbly enough. Turk’s accent is probably the most pronounced, but both he and Stojkovic bring an appealing commitment to their musical quarrels. Barainsky, meanwhile, manages to convey both coquettishness and mystery in the high soprano role of the Girl, bright, pure and agile. Steven Sloane, conducting, keeps the pace brisk but never breathless, and brings a knowing wit to Antheil’s occasional splashes of picture-postcard orientalism. Thoroughly enjoyable; the only question, really, is why CPO waited so long to release this 2009 recording.