This live recording of what some would argue is Rossini’s finest – certainly his most affecting – comedy was made at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro in August 2000. It makes for an entertaining listen, though how well it will ‘wear’ is another matter. There has been little or no attempt to tidy the recording into respectability for domestic consumption. Soloists and orchestra – though not, alas, the chorus – are all closely miked but a lot else gets onto the recording. As well as the usual array of on-stage noises (and some rather odd off-stage ones) there’s a good deal of blather from the pit – page-turning, tuning beneath applause, a half-heard conversation after the final curtain, and so on. Happily, there is absolute silence at the heart-stopping moment when Magnifico, denying the existence of a third daughter in the household, announces that she is dead.

Bruno Praticò is a delightful Magnifico. Killjoys will disapprove of some of his ‘business’, the funny voices in extravagant registers, but his singing has dash and style. At the top of this particular bill, however, is Juan Diego Flórez as the Prince. I continue to find his singing somewhat lacking in charm but he’s a class act. This is as well sung a Ramiro as you are likely to hear today. I also liked the Cenerentola, Sonia Ganassi. Hers is a most pleasing characterisation, incisive and affecting, though she is no match in the bel canto final scene, technically or imaginatively, for Chailly’s Cenerentola, Cecilia Bartoli. The production works pretty well for the microphone, though there are moments when the staging gets in the way. The Dandini, Roberto di Candia, mixes rather a lot of stage business (much laughter from the audience) with some decidedly uneven singing. The exchanges between him and Magnifico, as Dandini prepares to reveal that he is not the Prince, were clearly amusing in the theatre but they rather hang fire on record. Not that the exchange is particularly funny on the studio recordings – the old Glyndebourne performance with Sesto Bruscantini and Ian Wallace a cherishable exception.

I surveyed La Cenerentola on record in some detail when the Chailly set appeared in November 1993. That is still the best of the recent versions though it’s not sufficiently well cast on the male side to be the recording of one’s dreams. In some ways, the best all-round recommendation remains the 1971 Abbado set, though Ivan March’s reservations (9/99) about Berganza’s matronly Cenerentola and the lack of ‘uninhibited zest’ in Abbado’s conducting are ones which some collectors will share.

If it’s ‘uninhibited zest’ you are after, Carlo Rizzi may well be your man. He conducted the largely unrecommendable 1995 Teldec set with Larmore and Giménez in the leading roles but this live Pesaro performance is in a different league. The stretta of the Act 1 Quintet is taken impossibly quickly but for the most part he conducts with tremendous zip and vim. The Overture simmers and sings like an old-fashioned kettle on the hob; even more remarkable, the Act 1 finale is brought off with an accuracy and aplomb a studio-bound team would be hard-pressed to emulate.

The set boasts a pair of ripely characterised ugly sisters, one of whom, Ekaterina Morozova’s Clorinda, is given a rare opportunity to perform the tricky little two-part cavatina ‘Sventurata! mi credea’ which Rossini’s assistant, Luca Agolini, wrote for the prima in Rome in 1817. The Pesaro audience gives it a cool reception, which is unfair on the singer, though not on Agolini. The aria’s inclusion is one of the reasons why the new set spills over onto three CDs, a disadvantage in an otherwise exclusively two-disc field.

The compendious booklet is strong on scholarship but typically careless of more mundane matters such as the accuracy of its track listings.