The first night of Il barbiere di Siviglia in Rome in February 1816 was something of a fiasco. The situation wasn’t much better 140 years later in Milan. In 1816 the Basilio tripped on a trap door and had to sing the “Calumny” aria with a bloodied nose. Rossi-Lemeni doesn’t trip but his appallingly hammed-up performance is followed by a near riot as the anti-Callas claque gives him the kind of tumultuous reception Callas had signally failed to receive after “Una voce poco fa”.

In the singing lesson in Act 2, Callas sings a cut-down version of Rossini’s own “Contro un cor”, a tone up in E. It is not well done. Dr Bartolo’s response “Bella voce!” is asking for trouble from the gallery. The singer, Melchiorre Luise, attempts a rebuttal by spitting out his next line “Certo, bella voce”: a riposte which is met with further jeers from the gallery.

The production was neither new nor distinguished. In the absence of any proper stage direction this was one of those do-your-own-thing evenings. Gobbi dominates with his virtuoso singing and assured stage presence but the performance is brutal and humourless. Callas is completely at sea, both vocally (unsure whether it’s a soprano Rosina she is singing or a contralto) and theatrically (not a natural stage comedienne, she almost out-hams Rossi-Lemeni). Luigi Alva performs with a measure of decorum but he was very much the new boy on the block. Giulini, an unwilling conscript, appears to have neither the will nor the ability to control a performance where the singers are playing fast and loose with the corrupt and foreshortened text that in Milan in 1956 passed for an “edition”.

Profil’s reissue is almost as inept. There is little it could do with the constricted sound quality which crumbles around the edges, especially when Callas sings, but might at least have produced a few more cue points (just 19 are provided) and the note, about the opera not the performance, is an irrelevance given that no one would buy this set to learn about the opera.

A write-off? Well, not exactly. A year later Walter Legge took the same three principals into London’s Kingsway Hall and, with Galliera conducting, produced a classic recording of Il barbiere. To appreciate the extent of the miracle, you need to have heard the farrago on which it was based.