Triumphantly premiered in Naples in 1813, with Isabella Colbran (the future Mrs Rossini) in the title-role, Mayr’s take on the Medea myth was revised as a vehicle for Giuditta Pasta in the 1820s before gradually falling into oblivion. Henry Fothergill Chorley, most influential of mid-Victorian critics, wrote witheringly of “the faded book and correct music of Simone Mayr’s opera”. Spasmodic modern stagings, including David Alden’s St Gallen production from which this recording is taken, have tended to provoke modified rapture, with good reason. Mayr rises to the tragic grandeur of his theme in Medea’s Invocation scene, with its snaking, writhing chromaticism and sombrely impressive orchestration. Elsewhere, though, as Chorley implied, the invention can seem almost comically genteel and/or jaunty for the harrowing subject matter.

Mayr was a thoroughgoing operatic professional who knew how to pace and build a scene to an effective climax. Reflecting his early German training, his orchestration is more colourful than that of his Italian contemporaries, with obbligatos for, inter alia, violin, cello and harp, and plentiful woodwind solos. But time and again Mayr’s music frolics and pirouettes decorously where the situation – say, in the duet where Medea and the imprisoned Egeo bay for vengeance – calls for something altogether darker and more impassioned. There are shades of Cherubini’s Médée (a far finer opera) in the first-act confrontation between Medea and Giasone. More often, the invention suggests a cross between Mozart – a Mozart grown florid and faintly decadent – and early Rossini and Donizetti, though without the genius of either.

This St Gallen performance of Mayr’s revised (1823) score is adequate, no more. Best among the soloists are Evelyn Pollock’s nimble, sweet-toned Creusa (Medea’s saintly antithesis) and Lawrence Brownlee’s Egeo, pleasingly Italianate of tone and negotiating his vertiginous coloratura with skill and style. Creonte is sung decently, if without the ideal oaky resonance, by Wojtek Gierlach. On the downside, Mark Milhofer’s Giasone is disagreeably quavery, while Elzbieta Szmytka’s shallow-toned, sometimes shrill singing never remotely suggests the anti-heroine’s anguish and baleful grandeur. If the St Gallen strings sound thin (though the boxy acoustic does them no favours), the individual instrumentalists excel in their many solos, while David Stern shows a sure command of theatrical pacing. Oehms prints the full libretto with a German translation but only a cursory English synopsis. If they can find a copy, aficionados of early-19th-century Italian opera should seek out the Opera Rara Medea (11/94), more fully documented, better recorded and much more consistently cast, with Jane Eaglen imperious and rich-toned in the title-role.