Rossini’s La gazza ladra, based on the story of a French peasant girl who was hanged for thefts later discovered to be the work of a thieving magpie, is Rossini’s masterpiece in the semiseria form, the tensions between comedy and tragedy fused into ‘a sparkling diamond’. So argues scholar-conductor Alberto Zedda, who edited the work’s Critical Edition (Ricordi, 1979) and who conducted its first complete recording (Italia, 10/79 – nla). That Italia set was a useful standby but Zedda’s new recording, taken from performances at the 2009 Rossini in Wildbad Festival, is much finer. The only mystery is why it has taken so long to reach us.

Back in 1979 Zedda’s conducting was still work in progress. In this Wildbad performance he is very much master of his craft, conducting with a mixture of guile and élan that calls to mind the Rossini-conducting of Vittorio Gui. As the curtain rises on a busy village scene, the music seems to dance on points. This is very much an earnest of things to come. The Czech-based Virtuosi Brunensis were a newish ensemble in 2009 but under Zedda they play like born-and-bred Rossinians, endlessly responsive to detail and to those instrumental colours which Zedda’s love of the music makes manifest.

Like its immediate predecessor, La Cenerentola, La gazza ladra is an opera in which sentiment and pathos rub shoulders with human cruelty – except that La gazza ladra is no fairy-tale. Zedda understands these complex stylistic dimensions. Henrik Nánási, the conductor of David Alden’s recent Frankfurt production, runs a tight ship but his is a more formulaic view of Rossini which can end up making the music itself sound formulaic.

As a veteran of the Rossini scene, Zedda knows who the good young Rossini singers are. He also knows the skills they need and the freedoms they can be given in this particular score. Bruno Praticò aside, there are few ‘names’ in his cast, yet the singing is more or less consistently stylish and sharply etched. This is in marked contrast to the largely non-Italianate Frankfurt cast. Sophie Bevan is a vocally kempt and mettlesome Ninetta but many of the Frankfurt cast are out of their depth. The opera’s three principal bass roles, which include Ninetta’s deserter-father and her would-be seducer the local mayor, are testing at the best of times. Here they are particularly poorly done.

Frankfurt’s small theatre cuts go deeper than Wildbad’s, notably in the recitatives, which are dispatched at speed. These are not by Rossini, nor do they deploy the usual stress patterns, which is not a problem for Zedda’s Italian-trained cast, who deliver them with typical point and dramatic intelligence.

Frankfurt has a terrifying magpie, where Wildbad’s is the work of a rather feeble male impersonator (no Johnny Morris he). The march to the scaffold is chillingly done in Alden’s production, not least the offstage rifle fusillade (specified by Rossini), which causes the villagers to fear that Ninetta has indeed been executed. In Wildbad the fusillade is missing, which is a serious omission. The denouement already has a slightly end-of-evening feel to it.

This apart, the Zedda recording is an important addition to the Rossini discography which should stand La gazza ladra in good stead for some years to come. Neither set provides an English translation, though the Italian text can be downloaded from Naxos’s website.