Triumphantly premiered during the Munich carnival season early in 1775, La finta giardiniera (‘The pretend gardener-maid’) is
a typical commedia dell’arte-inspired tale of disguises (the gardening assistant of the title, Sandrina, turns out to be the Marchioness Violante Onesti), infatuations and mutual misunderstandings that ends in a triple wedding and general rejoicing. If the plot is ridiculous – though no more so than many another 18th-century opera buffa – and the characters generic, the 18-year-old Mozart’s music is delightful, sometimes rather more than that.

The haughty, upwardly mobile Arminda – though she eventually has to swallow her pride and settle for a knight rather than a count – has two fierily indignant arias in mock opera seria style. There’s a splendid ‘mad’ scene, half comic, half poignant, for the violently unstable count, and breezy buffo numbers for the comic servant pair, Nardo and the wily Serpetta, a proto-Despina. Sandrina herself grows from her jaunty opening aria to the tragic grandeur of her scena near the close of Act 2. Most memorable of all, and prophetic of Mozart’s Da Ponte comedies, are the ‘chain’ finales to the first and second acts, brilliant, multi-movement action ensembles of chaos and bewilderment, with kaleidoscopic shifts of mood and key.

In a sparse field, the most recommendable versions have long been those from Leopold Hager and Harnoncourt, neither of them ideal. René Jacobs now offers the best sung and characterised La finta giardiniera on disc, though one with a difference: provocative as ever, he opts not for the score as Mozart wrote it but for the version made by an unknown hand for Prague in 1796, which radically enriches Mozart’s modest orchestral palette. Purists will throw up their hands at the grafting of a 1790s sound world on to a score of the 1770s, and I sympathise. The ubiquity of the flutes nullifies Mozart’s intentionally sparing but telling use of them, as in Belfiore’s amorous ‘Care pupille belle’. Clarinets, sometimes usurping oboes, add a sensuous softness foreign to the original score. But it’s hard to disagree with Jacobs in the booklet that the anonymous Prague orchestrator performed his job with skill and imagination, in a style modelled on Figaro and Don Giovanni, though cavorting, frolicking flutes – here the uncontested stars of the woodwind pack – tend to dominate the comic numbers as they never do in Mozart’s mature operas.

Editions apart, for fizzing, irreverent theatricality this new La finta giardiniera is up there with Jacobs’s Gramophone Award-winning Figaro. Pacing seems spot-on, with recitatives enlivened by the hyperactive fortepiano, egging the characters on, sympathising with them in extremis, chuckling at their follies. The brilliant, minutely responsive Freiburg period band, too, plays words as well as tones. And the cast, several of them Jacobs regulars, do well both individually and as a quick-witted ensemble team.

In the title-role, the limpid-toned Sophie Karthäuser could make more of the Italian words. But she phrases with natural Mozartian grace and rises impressively to the passion and terror of her Act 2 scena. Her count, Jeremy Ovenden, combines an elegant, mellifluous tenor with evident comic flair, not least in his witty ‘catalogue’ aria boasting of his noble lineage. Sunhae Im – more aptly cast than in previous Jacobs recordings – and the ripe buffo bass of Michael Nagy spar and bicker with deft comic timing; and high baritone Nicolas Rivenq characterises the Pantaloon-like governor’s pomposity without hamming. Alex Penda (as Bulgarian soprano Alexandrina Pendatchanska now obligingly calls herself) brings her trademark dangerous, smouldering energy and flaming top notes to the role of Arminda, while the high, bright mezzo Marie-Claude Chappuis makes her mark as the knight Ramiro, not least in her tenderly phrased account of the pastoral aria ‘Dolce d’amor compagna’. Stick with Harnoncourt or Hager if you want this finest of Mozart’s teenage operas in something like its original form. But I confess to enjoying Jacobs’s ‘posthumous’, spruced-up Finta more than either. It’s certainly much more fun.