Semiramide was Rossini’s last opera for the Italian stage and his longest. With a running time of three and a half hours, it is a piece no theatre is going to stage without cuts. When the New York Met staged it in 1990, using Philip Gossett’s newly prepared Critical Edition, difficult choices had to be made, as we can see on the surviving DVD of the production (ArtHaus, A/02). But, then, the gramophone had been equally unaccommodating. The celebrated 1966 Decca recording starring Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne, which had brought Semiramide back from the shadows, was shorn of nearly an hour of music.

Wildbad’s decision to perform the opera complete had ramifications beyond completeness. You do not persuade a tenor of the pedigree of John Osborn to sing the comprimario role of Idreno if either of Idreno’s spectacular arias is cut. Osborn’s Idreno sits well alongside the other principals in this powerfully cast set. In terms of technique and dramatic presence, Marianna Pizzolato yields nothing to Marilyn Horne, her great predecessor in the role of Arsace. Lorenzo Regazzo’s Assur is also very fine. Assur is a clear precursor of Verdi’s Macbeth yet from the 1850s onwards few basses could sing the notes; certainly not Decca’s Joseph Rouleau, whose fudge and make-do articulation was all too typical of a happily vanished era. It was the Met’s Samuel Ramey who reclaimed Assur for modern audiences and Regazzo is a worthy successor.

Ten years ago Alexandrina Pendatchanska – or Alex Penda as she now calls herself – was a formidable Ermione. Here she is a formidable Semiramide, in general presence if not at all points of vocal technique. Top notes can spit unpredictably and her more or less persistent use of vibrato for dramatic effect, even in passages which require the most ductile legato, can be wearing. Yet she is a sympathetic partner to Pizzolato and the culminating scenes with Assur are superbly played. Neither the Czech orchestra nor the Polish chorus are in the very first division of excellence but the conducting of Antonino Fogliani has a compensating reach and authority.

Semiramide has always been an enigmatic work: theatrically austere in the neo-classical style yet beguiling in its vocal floridity. It’s this latter quality that continues to give the Sutherland recording its classic status, for all its attendant shortcomings. The Wildbad performance glowers more than it beguiles but its completeness and theatrical cogency make it an indispensable addition to any representative collection of serious Rossini on record.