Ferdinando Paer (1771-1839) is best known nowadays as the composer of Leonora (1804), based on the same subject as Fidelio, which it is also thought to have influenced. In his lifetime, however, Agnese was the work that made him famous. It was written in 1809 for private performance at the Palazzo Scotti near Parma, before it made its way into Europe’s opera houses. By the time it reached Paris’s Théâtre Italien in 1824, it had become a star vehicle, and Paer revised the score for Giuditta Pasta and Marco Bordogni, cast as the feuding Agnese and Ernesto. His reputation, however, was eventually eclipsed by that of Rossini, and after his death, Agnese remained in limbo until 2019, when it was revived in Turin, in the production filmed here, directed by Leo Muscato and conducted by Diego Fasolis.

The dramaturgy, dealing with madness and reconciliation, strikingly reminds us at times of late Shakespeare in its portrait of Agnese, fleeing back home from an unhappy marriage with the feckless Ernesto, only to find her father Uberto confined in a mental hospital, unhinged by her elopement, now believing her dead, and kept alive solely by the hope he will one day find her grave. Father and daughter are brought back together again by the intervention, under the watchful eye of the hospital’s perennially optimistic manager Don Pasquale, of the physician Girolamo, whose cure involves trying to persuade Uberto that Agnese has never left him and that the woman who cares for him – and whom he now no longer recognises – is indeed his daughter.

The score pivots back to Mozart and forwards to Rossini, as ensembles suggesting 18th-century models collide with set-piece arias, in which the dominant bel canto form of recitative, cavatina and cabaletta is already very much in place. As in Leonora, however, we’re also aware of Paer’s own original voice, in his attractive melodies and striking powers of orchestration. There are some remarkable passages, which Fasolis and his excellent Turin forces mine for all their worth. The ferocious opening storm, through which Ernesto pursues Agnese, casts long shadows over the rest of the work, and the pattering pizzicatos and meandering horn solos with which Paer suggests Uberto’s confusion are beautifully done.

The singing makes up in commitment for what it sometimes lacks in finesse. The best performance comes from Markus Werba as Uberto, handsomely voiced, superbly acted and heartbreaking in his recognition scene with María Rey-Joly’s Agnese. She takes a while to get into her stride, though her voice blazes with conviction in her big second-act rondo, where her upper registers are thrilling. Filippo Morace’s Pasquale blusters a bit and Edgardo Rocha is pushed at times as Ernesto, his coloratura not always flowing as smoothly as it might.

Muscato, meanwhile, updates the opera to the 1930s and gives it a surreal twist. Not all of his staging works. The set consists of enormous medicine tins that open to reveal the forest where Agnese hides from Ernesto, or Pasquale’s study, its shelves groaning under the weight of unread medical tomes. The sight of Uberto drawing graves and coffins on the walls of his cell is rightly unnerving but the wider view of the hospital, with its ceaselessly twitching patients overseen by bearded men in drag as nuns-cum-warders, is questionable. It’s by no means perfect, though the work itself is fascinating and deserves to be heard more frequently.