La Didone is the third of Cavalli’s surviving 27 operas. It was first performed in 1641, thus preceding Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea – also to a libretto by Busenello – by two years. However, this live recording is of Cavalli’s revision for Naples in 1650. A comparison with Dynamic’s version of the libretto (available only online) shows that cuts have been made: most inexplicably, the last words of Creusa, killed as she pops into her house to collect some jewellery before fleeing from Troy. There’s a lesson to be learnt there, one feels.

Creusa is the wife of Aeneas. She doesn’t appear in Les Troyens, but La Didone follows, more or less, the outline of the Berlioz opera. In Act 1, set in Troy, Cassandra sees her lover Coroebus mortally wounded by Pyrrhus, and Aeneas escapes at the behest of Venus. The rest of the opera takes place in Carthage. In Act 2, the widowed Dido rejects the approaches of Iarbas but falls in love with Aeneas, newly arrived. In Act 3, Aeneas abandons her in order to fulfil his destiny in Italy. The big surprise is that, after attempting suicide, Dido decides that she loves Iarbas after all. Directing the action, in or out of disguise, are various gods and goddesses; light relief is provided by a trio of maidservants.

The music is, as you would expect, a Monteverdian patchwork of recitative, arioso and aria; little of it, however, of Monteverdian quality. There’s a lament over a chromatic descending bass for Cassandra and a farewell to the sleeping Dido for Aeneas, movingly sung by Manuela Custer and Magnus Staveland respectively. Dido actually wakes up before Aeneas can make his getaway, and the drama comes to life in their impassioned exchanges. Claron McFadden makes an excellent Dido, both dignified and vulnerable. Jordi Domènech does what he can with the rather feeble mad scene for Iarbas.

Fabio Biondi’s band provides good support: I’m sceptical about the inclusion of four trombones, but they sound splendid. The synopsis is inadequate, and the online translation has its failings: when Iarbas mentions Calicut, on the Malabar coast of India, he doesn’t mean Calcutta.