This is a companion release to the warmly endearing performance of Verdi’s Falstaff (10/12) in which Carlo Maria Giulini led the Glyndebourne company at the 1955 Edinburgh Festival. Reviewing that set, Mike Ashman worried that the audience’s evident relish of the performance was directed more towards Carl Ebert’s Osbert Lancaster-designed production than towards the singing or conducting. I confess I wasn’t quite so worried; indeed, I rather relished the gentle purr of contentment the performance evidently inspired.

That said, this release of a 1960 Covent Garden performance of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia is something other. Once past the trenchantly conducted Overture and an opening scene during which Luigi Alva sings with a directness and intensity which often eluded him in the recording studio, whole swathes of Rossini’s score sink slowly but inexorably beneath gales of laughter as an endless succession of onstage gags reduces the patrons to a state of near-hysteria.

In between the gales of laughter there are glimpses of a vocally accomplished Rosina from the young Teresa Berganza (rather coolly received), ripely comic impersonations of Bartolo and Basilio from Fernando Corena and Ivo Vinco, and a truly dreadful Gino Bechi-like performance of the title-role by Rolando Panerai, whose violent and stylistically illiterate account of Figaro’s entrance aria is cheered to the echo by the adoring multitude.

Poor Giulini – doughty survivor of the catastrophe that was Maria Callas’s first attempt at Rosina in Milan in 1956 – and poor Rossini. ‘At least the natives were friendly,’ I hear him say, ruefully recalling the opera’s disastrous first night when much of the music was similarly drowned out by the din. This must have been a joyous experience that May evening in Covent Garden but it’s an evening which should have been left to marinate in the memories of those who were there rather than recycled for a wider public from these occasionally rather fractious-sounding radio tapes.