‘Moderately amusing and immoderately long’ was the much-missed John Steane’s witty summary of La finta giardiniera. Though I’d rate it slightly more highly than that, he had a point. Premiered in Munich early in 1775, it’s a commedia dell’arte-inspired tale of disguises and deceptions that tends to proceed at the leisurely pace of opera seria. Apart from the finales, ensembles are virtually non-existent. Comparisons with Figaro are unfair, perhaps, but hard to avoid. A few years after the Munich premiere Mozart helped to recast La finta giardiniera as a Singspiel, replacing the recitatives with spoken dialogue. In its new incarnation as Die verstellte Gärtnerin (‘The disguised gardener girl’) the opera had some success in Germany during Mozart’s lifetime, then disappeared from view. In the 20th century it was occasionally revived under the title Die Gärtnerin aus Liebe, and was recorded for the Philips Mozart Edition (5/92).

Until now the Philips recording has had the field to itself. It’s glamorously cast, with Jessye Norman, Tatiana Troyanos and Ileana Cotrubas among the principals. But Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt is a sedate, old-school Mozart conductor, while several of the singers sound too grand for their roles. This new version, recorded at performances in Munich’s Prinzregententheater in 2017, offers a far livelier theatrical experience. In song and dialogue the singers are well inside their parts, and Andrew Parrott gets crisp playing from his modern-instrument band, even if the bass lines can be a touch heavy. Frustratingly for non-German-speakers, though, the dialogue (and there’s rather more of it than on the Schmidt-Isserstedt recording) is not printed in the booklet.

If you can live with this drawback, there’s much to enjoy here. Singing with grace and lyrical ease – fiery intensity, too, in their respective ‘mad scenes’ – Sandrine Piau and Julian Prégardien are outstanding as the pair of serious lovers. Both outshine their counterparts on the Philips recording. Lydia Teuscher sparkles as the worldly maid Serpetta, Susanne Bernhard sings with spirit and attitude as the socially ambitious Arminda, and Olivia Vermeulen brings a warm, nimble mezzo to the castrato role of the knight Ramiro, whose dulcet Act 2 aria ‘Ach, schmeichelhafte Hoffnung’ is a musical high point. In the two overtly comic roles, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke and Michael Kupfer-Radecky relish their patter songs and catalogue arias without going over the top.

I’d always rather hear La finta giardiniera in its Italian original, not least because of the language. But if you want to sample Mozart’s Singspiel adaptation and don’t mind the reams of untranslated dialogue, I’d recommend this Munich recording over the worthy, unexciting Schmidt-Isserstedt.