Naxos has clearly taken up the Meyerbeer mantle from Opera Rara. With Il crociato in Egitto and Semiramide (A/06) already under its belt, it now issues Romilda e Costanza, the first of the composer’s six Italian operas but the last to make it to disc. Like its Semiramide, the recording is taken from a performance at the Rossini in Wildbad festival.

After a few faltering – and failed – attempts at writing an opera, Jakob Liebmann Beer journeyed to Venice to study the art of Italian opera first-hand. Rossini’s Tancredi was all the rage, and he fell under its spell and devoted himself to composing Italian operas. He even Italianised his name to Giacomo Meyerbeer. Romilda e Costanza was composed in 1817 to a libretto by Gaetano Rossi and given a successful premiere in Padua, after which it was performed in Venice, Milan and Florence, paving the way for five other Italian operas.

The music certainly displays a Rossinian influence. The work is described as a melodramma semiserio but the bouncy rhythms would lead one to believe the opera was less than entirely serious. It is, however, a sober plot, what Naxos describes as ‘a rescue opera overlaid with a love triangle’, whose geometry involves twin sons of the late king of Provence. Heir Teobaldo is torn between love for Romilda and Costanza, but Retello seizes the throne and has his brother locked up in a castle. Romilda, dressed as a page, joins Costanza in attempting to rescue the man they both love, which causes its own complications.

The performance is a little rough and ready, the sort you would be perfectly happy to encounter at a festival like Wildbad’s but not, perhaps, for repetition on disc. The playing of the Passionart Orchestra under Luciano Acocella is lively. Congolese tenor Patrick Kabongo is tested by Meyerbeer’s florid writing for Teobaldo, but his high notes are exciting. Chiara Brunello has a nice, fruity contralto as Romilda. She does not always negotiate the coloratura nimbly but she enjoys an impressive lengthy duet with Giulio Mastrototaro’s Pierotto. Luiza Fatyol (Costanza) has the set’s most interesting voice, a soprano with flashes of mezzo tone. Her intonation is not always secure, alas, but she sings with dramatic conviction. Recitatives are accompanied on the fortepiano.

Unlike Opera Rara, whose premium-product Meyerbeer issues contain comprehensive booklets housed within handsome boxes, Naxos is very much at the budget end of things. There’s a thorough booklet note plus a synopsis, but for the libretto you have to search online – and no, there’s no translation. You get what you pay for, of course, but I do hope Romilda e Costanza gets the Opera Rara treatment in due course.