The outward components of this set aren’t promising: Conductor Zubin Mehta is best known for heavier repertoire, the Israel Philharmonic hasn’t often been a paragon of style and Tel Aviv’s Mann Auditorium is hardly an optimum recording venue. All these factors, however, turned out to be the pluses (even the acoustics have an unexpected warmth) in what is otherwise a less-than-competitive Don Giovanni. Drawn from a series of concert performances, the recording has an overall conviction that makes a case for itself, not as anything close to a primary choice but as a way of touching base with what seems to have been an important event.

It’s the cast that makes you wonder why the set was issued. Only Chen Reiss’s fresh, focused Zerlina is suitable. The rest seem like non-Mozartian generalists, some having various degrees of wobble and the kind of vocal magnitude that dictates slower-than-typical tempi. These characteristics aren’t such a problem with Maurizio Muraro’s Leporello, given how winningly his bass projects the character’s hearty peasant temperament. His counterpart in the title-role, Nicola Ulivieri, has a rich, often lovely voice, but projects no particularly distinctive characterisation. In the Donna Anna/Don Ottavio axis, Anna Samuil pushes her voice in such ways that one hears the effort as much as the effect and, though Dmitry Korchak’s “Il mio tesoro” goes occasionally haywire in coloratura passages, there’s a good coloratura technique at the base of it.

The biggest puzzle is Maria Luigia Borsi’s Donna Elvira. She’s a throwback to an era when the likes of Birgit Nilsson sang Mozart roles if only because she could (more or less). It’s a big, bracing, inflexible voice that seems quite out of place here until she gets to “Mi tradì”; then it suddenly takes on a gracefulness in phrases where you’d least expect it to.

Mehta’s viewpoint is one that suggests that the past 25 years of Mozart performance practice hasn’t happened. His Mozart isn’t Furtwänglerian but something akin to Karl Böhm’s, with cleaner sonorities but plenty of authority. When not accommodating singers his pacing is intelligent. Tension and release happen in all the right places. Perhaps the best way to hear this performance (if at all) is to think of it as a historic recording that just happens to have been made two years ago. Then again, time might be better spent with any number of true historic recordings from 1950s Salzburg.