Where Tomás Bretón’s La Verbena de la Paloma, reissued by Naïve simultaneously with this disc (see page 84), represents the best of Spanish zarzuela’s one-act género chico, Amadeo Vives’s Doña Francisquita is the great glory of the three-act zarzuela grande. Based on Lope de Vega’s comedy La discreta enamorada, it tells of how the well-bred Francisquita wins over the student Fernando from an infatuation with an actress Aurora.

Always one of the most recorded of zarzuelas, Doña Francisquita received two rival recordings within five months of each other in 1993-94. Sony’s offers Domingo in glowing voice; but, for combination of beauty, tension and honesty, Alfredo Kraus’s is the voice I would most often want to hear in this work. He first recorded extended excerpts some 35 years previously, and the youthful thrust of that recording is obviously missing here. But technically, as well as for completeness (and I should not wish to miss a minute of this glorious score), this 1993 recording is streets ahead. Moreover, in María Bayo it has a delightful heroine. Her sweetly sung, refined and dramatic performance is epitomised by a splendid ‘Nightingale Song’ in Act 1.

Kraus and Bayo have the bulk of the solo singing, but there is rich support from mezzo Raquel Pierotti as the displaced Aurora and from Santiago San Jerico, whose light tenor contrasts well with Kraus. But not least, this is Madrid at carnival time: there are wonderful crowd scenes with all the excitement of a fiesta, backed up with ravishing orchestral writing embracing Spanish folk instruments. The recording omits dialogue, but the detailed four-language booklet summarises the action between the musical numbers as well as giving the full sung text.