As revivals of forgotten operas go this is a gem: a clever staging, finely sung, of an opera that owes its 200 years’ neglect more to the circumstances of its making than to the music, much of which is vintage early Donizetti.

True, it was Donizetti who recommended to La Scala, Milan’s house librettist, Felice Romani, an overly complex melodrama by the ‘Corneille of the Boulevards’, Guilbert de Pixerécourt. Romani clearly loathed it (and said as much) but, even by Romani’s standards, he was unusually late in delivering the text, leaving Donizetti three weeks to complete the opera. Composers wrote fast in those days. Still, it was quite a push.

Donizetti’s autograph manuscript is preserved in the Ricordi archive, complete with late-night candlewax on the brilliant Act 2 duet between the heroine Chiara and the opera’s delightful quixotic buffo, Don Meschino – a marvellous comic role, wonderfully well realised by Pietro Spagnoli. It’s a very Rossini-like duet. Since the hallmark of Donizetti’s emergent genius is that he was very much his own man, this may be a sign of the pressure he was under.

The story charts the machinations surrounding Chiara and Serafina, daughters of the enslaved (and falsely impersonated) mariner, Don Alvaro. It’s billed as a melodramma semiserio, yet it’s clear that having landed himself with this piece of tidied-up Gallic rodomontade, Donizetti didn’t entirely know whether he was writing melodrama or comedy.

Which brings me to the genius of Gianluca Falaschi’s Bergamo Festival staging, which plays the piece as part pantomime, part comédie larmoyante. He achieves this by having father and daughter, Alvaro and Chiara, played straight, and the rest as real people in pantomime mode. Falaschi’s fame is as a designer – hence the fabulously over-the-top costumes we have here. But he’s recently moved into production, at which he’s clearly a dab hand, with movement and music properly aligned as they always used to be.

It helps that it’s unknown Donizetti, not Don Pasquale in some new directorial makeover. It’s why we opera lovers beat a path to Wexford every autumn. Last year we were treated to Donizetti’s Zoraida di Granata, whose success in Rome in 1822 persuaded La Scala to commission Chiara e Serafina. The pitifully small audiences that turned up to see Chiara e Serafina were another factor in the opera’s demise. Still, La Scala has made handsome amends by furnishing this bicentenary Bergamo Festival revival with performers from its prestigious Accademia.

One Accademia star-in-the-making is soprano Greta Doveri, who sings Chiara, a lovely role which Donizetti rounds off with a grandstand finale alla Rossini which Doveri delivers with rare aplomb. Another is the baritone Sung-Hwan Damien Park in the pivotal role of Picaro, the erstwhile servant of the blackguard Don Fernando who bribes Picaro into impersonating Don Alvaro. Soprano Fan Zhou, dazzling in the cabaletta of her Act 2 aria, and tenor Hyun-Seo Davide Park are equally impressive as the lovelorn duo Serafina and Don Ramiro. And there’s a nice cameo from Valentina Pluzhnikova as Lisetta, target of what we would now call Don Meschino’s ‘inappropriate’ advances.

The highly experienced Sesto Quatrini conducts Donizetti’s winningly orchestrated score with flair and pinpoint precision. Even at his quickest, he’s never so quick that this superbly drilled Milanese ensemble isn’t with him all the way. The recitatives are also nicely done, with a few operatic in-jokes added for good measure.

Well filmed with a minimum of fuss, and furnished with an informative booklet, this is a DVD no lover of Donizetti can afford to miss.