It’s possible that in future times this set will be something of a collector’s item, thanks to the Isabella of its 29-year-old Russian mezzo, Vasilisa Berzhanskaya.

Conchita Supervia, the unforgettable Spanish mezzo, was the first fabled interpreter of the role on record, remembered for her 1927 Barcelona recordings of four of Isabella’s finest scenes (Parlophone, 9/57 – nla). More recently, it was Cecilia Bartoli who astonished us with her late-career debut as Isabella in a memorable staging by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier at Salzburg’s Whitsun and summer festivals in 2018 (Unitel DVD, A/19). And now we have Berzhanskaya, possibly the finest of all Isabellas on record: less idiosyncratic than Supervia or Marilyn Horne (Erato, 8/88 – nla) yet the equal of both in her own particular marriage of a finely honed bel canto technique and a keen sense of theatre.

Sadly, the set itself is little more than a memento of what was clearly an enjoyable afternoon in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw the day after Covid restrictions were lifted in February 2022. In earlier times, the performance would have ended up on a pirated disc, treasured by Berzhanskaya completists, while the rest of us luxuriated in some expensively produced studio recording with a cast and conductor worthy of both the opera and our newest Isabella.

What we have here, unfortunately, is a cast of mainly up-and-coming singers, several of whom should either not be singing Rossini or doing so under better tutelage. Take the Chilean bass-baritone Ricardo Seguel, who plays the hapless philanderer Mustafà, the Bey of Algiers. He has a fine vocal presence and runs well on even ground but he’s defeated by elaboration: those fioriture that are part and parcel of Rossini’s early bel canto writing.

As to the numerous lapses in taste and style of the Lindoro, emergent tenore di grazia Alasdair Kent, I partly blame the conductor, Giancarlo Andretta, who should have better advised him and better reined him in. The Taddeo, Pablo Ruiz, is excellent in ‘Ai capricci’, the famous duet with Isabella, but his great Act 2 scene of fear and bewilderment after his investiture into the bogus order of ‘Kaimakan’ is pretty well wrecked by Andretta’s unhelpfully fast tempo. (Rossini’s marking is a plain Allegro throughout.) In the final analysis, the set’s principal problem is erratic conducting, made worse by the bass-heavy sound and occasionally indifferent playing of a period-instrument orchestra that’s being required to perform early Rossini in too large a hall.

Happily, anyone looking for a first-rate L’italiana on CD can turn to the finely scaled and skilfully recorded 2008 Rossini in Wildbad Festival production on Naxos. There we hear a near-exemplary cast dashingly and exactingly led by Alberto Zedda, that late-lamented master of all things Rossinian, one of whose most distinguished pupils, we shouldn’t be surprised to hear, was Vasilisa Berzhanskaya.