This occasionally off-the-wall but finely sung and colourfully staged La Cenerentola was Rome Opera’s first foray into the media market, shown on television and in cinemas across Italy in 2016. It clearly had the funding. Emma Dante’s production will not have come cheap – Vanessa Sannino’s costumes are a particular feature – nor would the singers, given that this is as good a Cenerentola cast as any international house might currently muster.

It helps to see the DVD twice. Emma Dante loves byplay. I have yet to forgive her the ballet of hospital beds with which she ruined Lady Macbeth’s Sleepwalking Scene when the Turin company brought Verdi’s opera to Edinburgh in 2017. But there’s real point here, once you get used to it, to her turning Rossini’s large cast of servants into wind-up robots who mimic and elucidate the action rather like the chorus in an Aristophanes comedy.

The scene in which an enraptured and tongue-tied Prince meets a similarly stricken Cenerentola is exquisitely written by Rossini. With a larger audience in mind, however, Dante decides to spell things out, with the automata miming what’s going on in the minds of the love struck couple. Small red balloons slowly inflate during the duet’s sensuous andantino, only to wither into detumescence as reality breaks back in. Nor is Dante afraid of modern shibboleths, as in the Act 1 finale where 20 would-be brides turn up in their wedding dresses at the royal ball, only to shoot themselves one by one when a mysterious young woman is given the prince’s hand.

Alessandro Corbelli’s Magnifico remains without equal today in terms of stagecraft and delivery of text. Since Dante doesn’t do scenery, his installation as Superintendent of the Wine Glass must be done on the voice alone. But that’s no problem for Corbelli. Nor are we likely to find Magnifico’s two daughters better played than they are here by Damiana Mizzi and Annunziata Vestri, whose Tisbe has something of the ditzy allure of Joanna Lumley’s Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous.

For all the high jinks going on around the soloists, Dante ensures that the singers remain unmolested as they deliver some famously difficult music. The Dandini is Vito Priante, no less, superb in his long and demanding cod-heroic Act 1 cavatina. No one, however, shows off the production’s vocal riches more completely than Ugo Guagliardo in the comprimario role of Alidoro, the prince’s tutor. For the 1817 Rome prima, Rossini farmed out Alidoro’s only aria, but then replaced it in Rome in 1820 with a magnificent nine-minute bespoke scene for a revered local bass. Rossini’s librettist remarked that it needed a Hercules among coloratura basses to bring it off. Step forward Ugo Guagliardo.

Juan Francisco Gatell’s Prince looks a bit of a wimp, kitted out in his servant’s attire, but he is a strong performer, as the best Princes need to be in Act 2 where major confrontations are required. Serena Malfi is at her best vocally in the middle and lower registers. Like all good Cenerentolas, she has a strong and reassuring presence, though Dante subverts her final-act forgiveness by blithely turning Magnifico and his daughters into automata.

Conductor Alejo Pérez allows his singers the space they need but can also set the pulses racing, even with an orchestra that’s probably more used to moving at Puccini’s pace than Rossini’s. Peter Hall’s classic Glyndebourne staging remains closer to the Cinderella story stripped of pantomime which Rossini gives us. But this Rome production is high on entertainment value, as well as being exceptionally well performed.