This is a puzzling issue in some respects, as well as an unsatisfactory one. In essence, it’s an old-fashioned disc of opera intermezzos and overtures, of which Karajan’s not dissimilar 1968 ‘Opera Intermezzi’ album (DG, 6/69) remains both the prototype and benchmark, though where the latter is wide-ranging in scope, Lodovico Zocche and the Graz orchestra limit themselves to the Italian Verists. The booklet-notes, meanwhile – which come in German and disquieting translator-ese (‘Des Grieux…accompanies her to the wilds of Louisiana, where his dehydrated beloved breaths out her ruined life’, etc) – suggest we ponder how such a disparate group of post-Romantics came to be classified primarily as realists. The question is a fair one, which the disc, perilously short at 51 minutes, doesn’t adequately answer.

Zocche is an over-refined conductor in this repertoire, focused primarily on textural clarity and squeaky-clean playing throughout. It’s good to be reminded of Debussy’s impact on Italian music after the turn of the 20th century, with Montemezzi assimilating his harmonic and orchestral idiom in L’amore dei tre re (1913) five years ahead of Puccini in Suor Angelica. That Wolf-Ferrari’s Neapolitan breeziness in I gioielli della Madonna (1911) owes more than one might expect to the skittish overture of Mascagni’s Le maschere (1901) is another insight the disc affords. Zocche’s relentless emphasis on sonority, however, renders too much of it anodyne. The Cavalleria rusticana Intermezzo is passionless. The beautiful orchestral version of ‘Amor ti vieta’ which punctuates the second act of Giordano’s Fedora dawdles. It’s a dispiriting survey of music that should be immediate, intense, even emotive. Stick with the Karajan if you have it. Ondrej Lenárd, conducting a similar programme with the Slovak RSO (Naxos), is also to be preferred.