There are some operas that you may not claim to know very well but which nevertheless swing easily into mind. I don’t find L’arlesiana one of them, in spite of its famous tenor aria and its ‘hell-to-be-a-mother’ solo for the dramatic soprano. About it we may perhaps remember that the name-part, the girl from Arles who causes so much trouble, never appears. But then, thinking of that tenor aria, Federico’s Lament, could we, for instance, say exactly what is the ‘solita storia’ referred to in its first line, or who is the ‘pastore’ who used to tell it, or the ‘povero ragazzo’ who tells it over again and then goes to sleep? Would it surprise us to hear that, in answer to the first question, the story is about a wolf and a goat? And (to the second) that the tale is the philosophical shepherd’s parable concerning life’s cruelty and how (apparently) we poor humans just have to accept it? The questions and their answers may suggest at least part of the reason why the opera does not come out of store very often.

And it is (nearly all of it) a very good score, with characters whose predicaments should be moving, and partly are. This live recording from Montpellier carries a sense of the stage, and with it the local colour evoked most successfully through the use of off-stage chorus, sometimes with a musical suggestion not so much of Ravel as of Delius. It’s a good performance but not one I could honestly recommend in preference to its predecessor from 1991 under Charles Rosenkrans. Here, the interest will probably centre on the tenor, Giuseppe Gipali. He was enthusiastically heard in London a year ago in one of the Rosenblatt recitals, a purveyor of decibels and a voice of quality with it. As poor, besotted Federico, however, he is a provincial beside Péter Kelen’s ardent and much more imaginative account in the earlier recording. Gipali’s is an unusually fine voice, somewhat in the manner of Del Monaco though with a warmer timbre: but he has no style, no evident dramatic intelligence, and his singing of the Lament misses all the essential moments for softening (though, to his credit, he omits the odious, voluntary high B, too).

The Rosa Mamai, Marianne Cornetti, has authority and warmth but also a loosening vibrancy, generally less pleasing than 1991’s Elena Zilio. Angela Maria Blasi (a recent Musetta at Covent Garden) is a fresh-voiced, emotionally sympathetic Vivetta (the Micaëla part) and the same could be said of Ambrogio Maestri’s Baldassare, except that the rival, Barry Anderson, not only sings very well but has the rounder tones of age in his voice. The conducting too is very able, but the other is more taut and purposeful.

I wouldn’t turn this down if it came my way but, if making a considered choice, would try for the earlier recording (and perhaps Tagliavini, Tassinari and Silveri under Arturo Basile from 1955). I certainly would not let L’arlesiana fall, unheard, between the three.