>‘Berlin: whenever I hear that name I simply have to smile!’ If you’re after a recording of ‘Berliner Luft’, the German capital’s unofficial anthem, you’re not short of library choices: everyone from the Comedian Harmonists to André Rieu, as well as the Berlin Philharmonic under Abbado, Rattle, Petrenko … take your choice. But if you want to hear this irrepressible quick march in its original context – Paul Lincke and Heinrich Bolten-Baeckers’s 1899 ‘burlesque-fantastic-scenic-operetta’ Frau Luna – your options have been more limited: usually a mono-era Hamburg radio broadcast or a high-kitsch 1960s highlights collection.

Once again, CPO’s ongoing operetta series rides to the rescue, with this belated release of a 2006 radio performance from Cologne. Not exactly Berlin Air, then, but who’s counting when it feels as fresh as this? Frau Luna was Berlin’s first real home-grown operetta smash: relocating the plot of Offenbach’s La voyage dans la lune to the banks of the Spree and setting the result to a score that – when it isn’t sinking luxuriantly into the arms of a waltz – fizzes and bustles with all the baton-twirling élan of a Prussian military band.

This is a Berlin that predates Wall, wars or Weimar cabaret: a glittering 19th-century metropolis whose audiences were every bit as fun-loving as their contemporaries in those other great operetta capitals, Paris, London and Vienna. The plot is at once down-to-earth and utterly fantastic: the young engineer Fritz Steppke is fascinated by the possibilities of aviation, to the scorn of his landlady Frau Pusebach and her niece Marie, his sweetheart. He constructs a balloon and flies them to the moon, only to find that its queen Frau Luna and her court are just as intrigued by life in Berlin.

Like many operettas Frau Luna expanded to match its own popularity, with Lincke revising it from a one-act curtain-raiser into the two-act score recorded here. Along the way, it absorbed numbers from other sources, such as the familiar Glühwürmchen-Idyll from Lincke’s 1902 operetta Lysistrata. That’s included here, as is (functioning as a sort of intermezzo) Lincke’s Humoreske for bassoon and orchestra. On what musicological authority, I couldn’t say – and don’t expect any help from CPO’s booklet notes, which are as sketchy as ever. There’s no libretto in any language; German speakers will be able to follow the spoken dialogue but otherwise your best bet is the synopsis in Mark Lubbock’s Complete Book of Light Opera (Putnam: 1962).

That’s a pity, because this is a sparkling account of an infectiously tuneful score, with performers who bring just the right mixture of musical weight and dramatic zest. From the very first bar, it buzzes: the Overture positively clicks its heels and throughout the two discs Froschauer combines an easy lilt with lightly worn panache. Waltz melodies glide but don’t wallow, and the marches (Frau Luna’s ‘Lasst den Köpf nicht hängen’ is almost as catchy as ‘Berliner Luft’) are springy and bright, with the Cologne players savouring Lincke’s whipped-cream woodwind-writing (he was a virtuoso bassoonist in his own right).

As to the cast: again, they’re well suited to the piece and seem to be having a terrific time, with Boris Leisenheimer and Anneli Pfeffer both suitably engaging as the two Earth-bound lovers, while Barbara Dommer strikes a comic note (without sacrificing musical values) as the widow Pusebach. Maria Leyer’s delightfully clear, bell-like soprano gives a suitably extraterrestrial tingle to the title-role, and plays charmingly against the well-seasoned but still stylish singing of René Kollo as her interplanetary suitor Prince Sternschnuppe. Kollo was about to turn 70 at the time of these sessions, but as the grandson of the Berlin operetta composer Walter Kollo, he’s a living connection to Lincke’s vanished world.

Reservations? Well, we’ve dealt with the booklet. The chorus is occasionally scrappy, and further back than I’d like, and no one would mistake the studio dialogue for a live performance. But these are small caveats. Every operetta buff will want this, and I suspect everyone else will simply be swept along by the joie de vivre and sheer melodic flair of this underrated – but unarguable – classic of its genre. Earworms incoming: don’t say I didn’t warn you.