'As for the work itself’, wrote George Bernard Shaw for The World on the occasion of the opera’s Covent Garden premiere in June 1894, ‘there is hardly anything to be said in face of the frankness with which Massenet has modelled it on Cavalleria. He has not composed an opera: he has made up a prescription …’

The Girl from Navarre is truly a cloning of both the style and the content of Mascagni’s pioneering verismo opera. It is also most economical. In barely three-quarters of an hour (alongside Mascagni’s 70 plus) Massenet manages all of two acts, an orchestral entr’acte intermezzo, choruses of soldiers both at war and play, a love duet and a confrontation scene, a father/son/lover dispute and a mad scene (the finale). The opera’s fate, following initial success (sometimes as an early double bill with Cav before Pagliacci invariably took that place), was to fade from the repertoire with one-off performances – and, later, recordings – occurring roughly every 30 years at the whim of individual divas or conductors.

Why? A lot of the music is beautifully and memorably realised both melodically and through the orchestra – the French composer was at this stage of his career a more mature man of the theatre than Mascagni. Yet this music inhabits and illustrates the libretto rather than tranforms it. For all its directness (detractors call this ‘crudity’) Cavalleria rusticana’s characters become true archetypes whereas La Navarraise’s remain pasteboard functionaries for whom we feel little. We never know who Araquil is, or why, after such passionate declarations in Act 1, he throws away his love for Anita (the girl) with sudden fits of jealousy and moral outrage. His death seems over-convenient in terms of timing and Grand Guignol in terms of effect. Anita has something of the obsessiveness in love of bygone Italian opera heroines. But it’s hard to relate to her mercenary mission to obtain a dowry by murdering the Carlist general for money, even if we feel sympathy for her not being allowed to marry Araquil for lack of funds.

The present issue is a belated celebration of the Opera Orchestra of New York’s intended return to full-time activity in 2010, reuniting many of the principals of that concert but now with Aleksandra Kurzak as the heroine. Veronesi, the then successor-elect of founding maestro Eve Queler, conducts with much élan and the cast are in good shape. Alagna is passionate but never hysterical in tracking the extremes of Araquil’s emotions. Kurzak lacks only the colour of character that Lucia Popp, no less, brought to the role of Anita in an early 1970s recording under Antonio de Almeida now on Sony. If you wanted one Navarraise that should still be your choice, creditable as this new release is.