Listening to Franz Lachner’s Catharina Cornaro, one can hear why it might have held a position in the repertoire of the Munich Opera for six decades after its premiere. One can also hear why, having fallen out of the repertoire, it never returned. It’s a solid, well-crafted work that ticks enough boxes and offers some opportunity for spectacle. It offers nothing to scare the horses, but, at the same time, it rarely raises the pulse. One should be grateful, however, to those behind this enterprising recording – of a concert where the opera was heard complete for the first time in over a century.

Lachner himself served as music director of the Munich Court Opera for some three decades from 1836. Ludwig II’s accession to the throne, bringing Wagner to the Bavarian capital, marked the beginning of the end of that engagement. And it’s difficult not to judge the composer’s 1841 work (recorded in its revised version, created for Berlin in 1845) without knowledge of what came later, even if it’s Verdi who comes to mind more than Wagner, given the opera’s plot of political machinating and love sacrificed to state.

Lachner’s libretto was adapted from one already set by Fromental Halévy, and CPO’s generous booklet essay notes that his models were to be found in the earnest grand opéra tradition descended from Spontini as much as anywhere else. The good characters are piously virtuous, the bad only mildly evil. The plot is conventional and concludes with a happy ending of sorts. Catharina is reunited with Marco, her true love. The unusually understanding and pragmatic King Jakob – the reason for their being split up – dies from slow-acting poison administered by the dastardly senator Onofrio.

The score’s final scene contains some of its most engaging music: a rousing and atmospheric martial interlude, Jakob’s moving final utterance, a touching final chorus. Elsewhere the easy melodies flow in a musical language that offers an appealing mixture of early grand opéra and Weber and Schubert; and there’s a nicely atmospheric Gondoliers’ chorus at the start of Act 2. To hear the finale of Act 3, though, is to realise that Lachner is no inspired dramatist. He offers few moments I’ve rushed back to hear again.

There are times when Ralf Weikert could do a little more to whip up excitement in Lachner’s score but on the whole he makes a decent case for the work, with characterful playing from the Munich Radio Orchestra. Kristiane Kaiser is persuasive in Catharina’s music, and Daniel Kirch deals with the challenges of Marco well – it’s one of those tricky roles, by the sound of it, that sits between lyricism and proto-Heldentenor heroics. Mauro Peter is an eloquent and appealing Jakob, and Simon Pauly and Christian Tschelebiew complete the picture as Andrea and Onofrio.

Nothing to set the world alight, then, but an interesting release that fills a gap in our understanding of this period of operatic history.