No 18th-century Italian opera composer worth his salt could resist Didone abbandonata, the libretto that made Pietro Metastasio’s name. With a modernising makeover (fewer arias, more ensembles and choruses) it was still fair game as late as 1823, when Saverio Mercadante composed his dramma per musica for Turin. To create the obligatory Baroque opera love triangle, Metastasio introduced into the familiar story the figure of the Moorish King Jarbas, who lusts after Dido, locks horns with Aeneas and, after the Trojan Prince’s scheduled departure for Italy, razes Carthage when she refuses to yield to him.

Although not billed as such, this DVD from the 2018 Innsbruck Early Music Festival is the first recording of an opera that certainly deserves its rescue from oblivion. Mercadante, even at this early stage of his career, is a polished craftsman, spins an agreeable line in plaintive melody and uses the conventional operatic forms effectively. From the evocative horn solo in the overture, the colourful woodwind-writing shows why Mercadante quickly acquired a reputation for inventive orchestration. Individual scenes generate real power, above all the Act 2 trio for Dido, Aeneas and Jarbas. Yet compared with Rossini at his best (the obvious point of reference), let alone Verdi, Mercadante lacks the gift of seizing a dramatic situation by the throat and intensifying it. Time and again his music seems inappropriately jaunty and short-breathed, with moments of high tension always likely to be defused by tootling, pirouetting woodwind. Listening ‘blind’ to long stretches of Didone – including the potentially climactic love duet for Dido and Aeneas – you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled on an opera buffa.

Almost predictably, Jürgen Flimm’s production relocates, updates and distorts the action. The setting is modernist-ugly. Rusted metal frames and concrete blocks suggest a decrepit building site, while the intermittent props consist of a chaise longue, a couple of armchairs and (why not?) an old fridge. The tone veers between black-comic grotesquerie and savagery, culminating in the rape and murder of Dido’s sister Selene, who earlier had pined hopelesssly for Aeneas, and the butchering of all and sundry.

That neither Dido nor Aeneas engage our sympathy as composer and librettist surely intended is hardly the fault of the singers, both of whom rise impressively to Mercadante’s virtuoso demands. In Flimm’s conception Dido, first seen languidly painting her toenails, begins as a teasing, pouting sex kitten and is later prone to fits of petulance. Even with Lithuanian soprano Viktorija Miškūnaitė's skilled and confident advocacy (the odd squally top note apart), she never attains true tragic stature. Mezzo Katrin Wundsam cuts a convincingly upright, ‘masculine’ figure as Aeneas, reluctant to besmirch his honour by kiling Jarbas. Singing evenly across a wide range, she embellishes tastefully and excels both in subtly inflected lyricism and swashbuckling coloratura.

Carlo Vincenzo Allemano, as an increasingly deranged, brutalised Jarbas – Aeneas’s moral antithesis – fields a strong, baritonal tenor with a rough edge, appropriate enough for Flimm’s conception of the character. The minor roles include a decent tenor and wobbly bass. As a knowing, seductive Selene, Emilie Renard makes the most of her song expounding her philosophy of love, à la Despina. A pity she has so little to sing. There’s aptly hearty, macho singing from the male chorus, who as Jarbas’s warriors sport uniforms modelled on the French foreign legion; and Alessandro De Marchi directs his lean period forces (thinnish strings, pleasantly tangy woodwind) with energy and sensitive understanding of the idiom. For all Didone’s musical-dramatic limitations, bel canto fanciers will find much to enjoy here, though for many this will be despite rather than because of Flimm’s production.