Rossini’s first professional opera, written for Venice’s Teatro San Moisè when he was 18, is full of dash and pizzazz. There have been four recordings to date, of which the best by some distance was a 1960s echt-Italian version with Renato Fasano conducting I Virtuosi di Roma and an impressive cast led by Renato Scotto (Delysé, 7/67 – nla). Since then we’ve had a ruinously reverberant recording on Claves and a hard-driven, indifferently sung and closely miked Pesaro Festival performance on Dynamic.

This newest taping dates from the same year (2006) as the Pesaro account but is superior in almost every respect. It is sprucely, at times wittily conducted by Christopher Franklin, and there is a good cast that includes a decent tenor as the romantic lead and a pair of lively buffo basses as the hard-headed north countryman Tobias Mill and his rather warmer-hearted opposite number, the Canadian businessman Slook, to whom Mill attempts to sell his daughter. The Lithuanian soprano Julija Samsonova sings Fanny, the commodity in question, and sings her rather well. It is she who has the score’s highlight, the joyous “Vorrei spiegarvi il giubilo” – Joan Sutherland once recorded the aria – whose cabaletta resurfaces in Act 1 of Il barbiere di Siviglia in the duet “Dunque io son”. Samsonova is a little lacking in fleetness in that cabaletta but she takes her chances earlier on, not least in the aria’s lyric section.

The secco recitatives are played with rather more panache in the Pesaro staging but the Wildbad production is lively enough. The rapturous reception at the final curtain is testament to that.