And what, you may well ask, is Iphigenia doing in Thrace? Hoping to intercept Orpheus, before he is torn to pieces by the Bacchantes infuriated by his never-ending lament for Eurydice? The prosaic answer is that Nebra’s librettist didn’t know his Thrace from his Tauris: we are indeed on the Black Sea, and the plot is the same as Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride – sort of. Iphigenia and Orestes are present and correct, but so is their sister Electra, who has neither danced herself to death (Strauss) nor suffered unrequited love on Crete (Mozart). Moreover, she is married to Orestes’ bosom friend, Pylades. Then there’s Priam’s son Polydorus, who loves Iphigenia; and Dircea, his intended – wandering in from another legend altogether – who fancies Orestes.

José de Nebra (1702-68) was a church musician, employed by the Spanish court as composer, organist and choirmaster, and a prolific composer of works for the stage. Iphigenia en Tracia, performed in Madrid in 1747, is a zarzuela, an opera of which the greater part consists of spoken dialogue. The dialogue is omitted on this live recording, which makes it hard to keep abreast of the action: Electra and Pylades don’t have singing roles, for example, and the relevance – if any – of the comic turns is a mystery.

The music is very agreeable, and Italianate in style: secco recitatives (with one accompanied recitative at the end) and da capo arias, including a simile aria – our old friend the shipwreck – for Polydorus. The scoring is string-based, but not uniformly so: Polydorus’s aria has prominent parts for the horns and Iphigenia’s aria in Act 1 includes some charming interplay between flutes and strings. But Nebra doesn’t half go on. He will repeat the A section of a da capo number before proceeding, and then of course round it comes again. The catchy sequence of suspensions in the Act 1 quartet palls on the umpteenth repetition and Cofieta’s aria lasts for a good 10 minutes.

There are no weak links among the all-female cast and the orchestra is excellent. A byway rather than a highway, enjoyable and interesting but not, perhaps, essential.