This appears to be the first digital recording of Nino Rota’s 1955 comedy after a French play by Eugène Labiche and Marc-Michel, Il cappello di paglia di Firenze (‘The Florentine Straw Hat’). Rota’s third opera of 10 is also his best known, its assembly of small-town stock characters extending the tradition of both Donizetti and the commedia dell’arte but bestowing on it the composer’s ability to capture fleeting tenderness amid all the high jinks, even if he is cribbing an awful lot off Puccini.

The story is of Fadinard, a young man about to marry, whose horse discovers the headgear of the title and munches through it. The hat’s owner needs an identical replacement to hide the fact that she was in flagrante with a soldier while it was taken, and insists on hiding in Fadinard’s apartment until one is sourced. A domestic farce ensues as the wedding guests arrive, with order only restored when a matching hat is finally procured and the wedding can continue (and the affair, of course …
this is Italy).

The work rushes by, a series of highly woven vignettes that capture the nature of a scene or an off-the-shelf character – Rota’s strong suit on screen as well as on stage – but perhaps not much more. Rota’s music is a blend of verismo, Schicchi-like buffa and operetta, but lacks the latter’s consistent sparkle and verve, perhaps as the story is clunkily told (Rota himself was a co-librettist). Shapely tunes are in abundance but you won’t remember any of them. The phantoms of other composers drift by at quite a rate, Mozart, Puccini and Leoncavallo appearing most frequently.

Listening, you have to remind yourself what a treat some of Rota’s tricks would work on stage. He knows how to marshal an opera’s moving parts, chorus included (as was obvious from Il due timidi, 1950 – Dynamic, 4/19), and can occasionally string together a sequence with sufficient momentum and unpredictability to bring a scene alive. The ear pricks up at the duet ‘Caro signore’, with its louche obbligato violin and clarinet, one of a few flashes of impeccable style. The rest of the time, Rota can appear to be focusing on simply wrestling all the jokes, characters and plot information down into score.

The big number is Fadinard’s ‘Io voglio quel cappello’, sung at the work’s main-stage La Scala debut by a young Juan Diego Flórez in 1998 and delivered here with no lack of seductive Italianate legato – and a ringing top note – by Piotr Buszewski. The equivalent moment for Fadinard’s fiancée Elena is ‘Papà, gli voglio bene’, sung with impressive control by Tetiana Miyus, whose soprano is lined with a steely strength. You can imagine both those moments heightening the atmosphere inside a theatre. Whether you have the patience and imagination to listen to the surrounding two hours of farce with nothing to look at – even in the company of Daniele Squeo’s scrupulous conducting – is another question.