Premiered at the suburban Theater auf der Wieden in 1789, Paul Wranitzky’s Oberon fuelled the Viennese appetite for ‘magic operas’ that mixed comedy, allegory and spectacular stage effects. The ever-resourceful theatre manager and librettist Emanuel Schikaneder was quick to trade on the success of Oberon, often in tandem with singer-composers Benedikt Schack and Franz Gerl. The Schack-Gerl collaboration Der Stein der Weisen (‘The Philosopher’s Stone’), with contributions from conductor Johann Baptist Henneberg and Mozart, led directly to Die Zauberflöte, where Schack played Tamino and Gerl Sarastro, and Schikaneder regularly stole the show as Papageno. Mozart’s Singspiel made Schikaneder a small fortune, and in turn inspired him and composer Peter von Winter to create a sequel, Das Labyrinth. In hindsight, Winter faced an impossible challenge. The Theater auf der Wieden’s audiences evidently agreed.

An ingenuous, bright-eyed Papageno, Konstantin Krimmel casts his net wide to include not only magic operas in the Wieden’s repertoire but also Salieri’s comedy La grotta di Trofonio, composed for the imperial Burgtheater, and a pair of Haydn operas that draw on the supernatural. With his suave, rather tenorish baritone, Krimmel duly savours these assorted plebeian philosophers and pantomime villains, whether in the nimbly dispatched, proto-Papageno songs for Lubano in Der Stein der Weisen or the mock-heroic fulminations of the opera’s ‘baddie’ Eutifronte. Krimmel’s low notes lack protein in a ‘vengeance’ aria from Oberon, with its gleefully mocking woodwind. But he always acts vividly, and specifically, with the voice, not least in the merchant Aristone’s vigorous solos from La grotta di Trofonio, where Salieri proves himself a cut above Winter, Wranitzky et al.

Exploiting the comic potential of the over-the-top texts, Krimmel brings swaggering bravado to the strutting, biceps-flexing King Rodomonte’s numbers from Orlando paladino. In serious mode – a rarity on this disc – he sings the philosophising Creonte’s cantabile arias from Haydn’s unperformed (until 1951) Orpheus opera with grave eloquence. All the while Rüdiger Lotter’s Munich period band are energetic, colourful accomplices. The woodwind relish their many opportunities. On the final track the breathily innocent period flute stars in Gluck’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits: a touching if slightly arbitrary conclusion to an entertaining celebration of Viennese popular operatic taste in the age of Mozart.