‘I want a great rollicking sound’, Ethel Smyth told the BBC Symphony Orchestra at rehearsals for her 1914 comic opera. Prepare yourself to be only mildly rollicked by this, the first complete recording of a work that travelled around the UK to acclaim during the composer’s lifetime but has since fallen into obscurity. Now it’s been brought back by the Lontano Ensemble, conducted by Odaline de la Martinez, a strong champion of Smyth’s work – austerity presumably the reason why the conductor has opted for the smaller of the two chamber orchestrations prepared by the composer.

The new recording, which for some reason has taken almost two years to be released, is a cheerful effort at a pleasant but unmemorable work. The boatswain is the (now retired) Mr Benn, who concocts a daft plan involving Travers, an ex-army man down on his luck, in order to woo a redoubtable widow, pub landlord Mrs Waters – something of a British seaside counterpart to Puccini’s Minnie in La fanciulla del West.

Smyth tips her hat to different traditions: thematically, the short domestic farce goes back to the intermezzo tradition of Pergolesi, but there are more authentically British elements of music hall, John Gay and Arthur Sullivan all mixed in. Unusually, Smyth opts for a first half alternating speech and song, then ditches the spoken words in the second half as Benn’s plan goes very wrong and Travers and Mrs Waters realise the future might not be so lonely after all. The most persuasive weapon in Smyth’s armoury is her use of traditional folk songs, which give a warmly nostalgic undercurrent.

The composer struggles, however, to give much interior life to the characters, or to give them musical space to breathe: her text, adapted from WW Jacobs’s story, is wordy and meandering, and where the pratfalls of the second half should rattle along like Falstaff being dumped into the Thames, Smyth is neither a Verdi nor a Boito and it all rumbles along rather placidly. Sharper and nimbler playing from the Lontano Ensemble might have helped too.

Dramatically, what’s most intriguing about the premise is that Travers, Benn and Mrs Waters are rather shopworn: people who know their best days are behind them. So it’s a little perverse that three young singers tackle these parts. The men, Jeremy Huw Williams’s Travers and Edward Lee’s Benn, do their best with the ‘how’s your father’ dialogue yet both come off slightly bloodless. Nadine Benjamin sings sweetly and purely as Mrs Waters – but you don’t really hear a wistful widow here. By contrast, in excerpts recorded under the composer’s baton in 1916, also included on this album, you can listen to the original exponent of the part, Rosina Buckman. And her ardent delivery of the standout number, ‘What if I were young again’, Smyth’s bittersweet nod to the folk song ‘Lord Randall’, is simply in another league.