One of the world’s best jokes immortalised in a masterpiece of a score: it doesn’t often fail and indeed is far from doing so now, though I wouldn’t recommend this as a first-choice version, or a second, either. It is of course a company-opera, dependent essentially on everyone playing their part in the team, coming in on the dot and keeping the light of comedy in their eyes. That much the performance certainly has, and its three leading singers (Alberto Rinaldi a sonorous, slightly sinister Schicchi, the lovers sounding young and healthy) are well up to what is asked of them. The orchestral playing is alert and precise, recorded, too, with plenty of body. And the conductor knows what he’s after; and yet it is with him that misgivings arise.

All is well at curtain-up – attack, busy-ness, relaxation – but then the mock-lament, its delightful orchestration rendered with admirable clarity, has a kind of clockwork precision that mis-tells the joke. The hunt for the will begins, and, by perhaps no more than a second, misjudges so that points which usually raise a laugh (the false-alarm discoveries, for instance) are moved along too quickly. The family’s will-reading takes a less audible form than usual, and again it’s over too quickly. Alexander Rahbari, the conductor, is no doubt responsible for tempo and perhaps for the less exclusively musical decisions about dramatic pacing; but, in a recording, the man who must try to help listeners see as they hear is the producer, Michael Seberich, who in this instance is not very successful.

We do need help in an opera of this kind – the recorded sound has to direct the eyes of imagination. For my liking, the balance between stage and orchestra also needs readjustment. On stage, the singers are helped by lighting; deprived of that, they need some compensation. I find the mental stage far more vivid in the recording from Turin in 1949 under Alfredo Simonetto with Giuseppe Taddei as Schicchi; and if it weren’t for a weak Lauretta and the absence of libretto, that would be my recommendation for a single-disc version.

As it is, the Munich recording (1988) under Patanè with the veteran Panerai in the title-role is worth trying – but if you are still without a Trittico (the three one-act operas of which Schicchi is the third), why not be reckless and go for that? And there my preference is not for the recent Pappano set, with José van Dam greyly unidiomatic as Schicchi, but rather for the old EMI version which has a cast headed by the incomparable Tito Gobbi and the adorable Victoria De los Angeles (that Gianni Schicchi is also available on a single disc on HMV Classics).