Rossini was 24 and recently arrived in Naples when, early in 1816, he was commissioned to provide the music for a masque in honour of the marriage of Princess Maria Carolina, Ferdinand IV’s granddaughter, and the Duc de Berry, second son of France’s future Charles X, for whose coronation in 1825 Rossini would provide an even more elaborate pièce de circonstance, Il viaggio a Reims. The year 1816 was an extraordinary one for Rossini, beginning with the Rome prima of Il barbiere di Siviglia, carrying on through this wedding entertainment and the vernacular Neapolitan comedy La gazzetta, and ending with the twin triumphs of Otello in Naples in early December and La Cenerentola in Rome seven weeks later.

Like Handel, Rossini was a master of the art of recycling, of which Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo is a prime example, with music originally written for opera houses in Bologna, Ferrara, Venice and Milan newly recruited to the colours. He even drew on Il barbiere, from which he concocted a magnificent showpiece aria for the goddess Ceres. ‘Even when Rossini is making a patchwork, the music never loses direction’, noted Riccardo Chailly, conductor of the memorable 1998 Decca recording of Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo. ‘In the end, he seems to be saying exactly what he wants to say.’

Le nozze was a royal commission, and Rossini had vocal royalty to realise it: Margarita Chabrand and Giovanni David in the title-roles, Isabella Colbran as Ceres, Andrea Nozzari as Jove. As did Chailly in Milan in 1998, with a cast headed by Juan Diego Flórez as Peleo and Cecilia Bartoli as Ceres, with Elisabetta Scano, Daniela Barcellona and Luigi Petroni sure-footed in the attendant roles.

The new Naxos disc, recorded live at the 2018 Rossini in Wildbad Festival, proffers no such riches. As a performance, it offers us what you might call the rough up and down of the work, but the singing is rarely more than mediocre. Leonor Bonilla and Marina Comparato make some pleasing sounds in the duet between Ceres and Juno, but Bartoli and Barcellona offer those and more besides.

The Decca disc has a warmer, more intimate acoustic and a pleasing fill-up in the form of the 16-year-old Rossini’s cantata The Lament of Harmony on the Death of Orpheus, with Paul Austin Kelly as the tenor soloist. It also has a complete text and translation and a predictably fine booklet essay by Philip Gossett. Naxos’s note is generous in length – getting on for 4000 words – but it says nothing about the music.