“The last celebration of the ancien régime” proclaims the booklet of La Daunia felice, an allegorical festa teatrale composed for a Neapolitan Bourbon wedding in 1797. With Napoleon’s forces victorious in northern Italy, Jacobin sentiment was rife in Naples, and the libretto’s promised fortunate millennium for “Daunia” – the Kingdom of Naples – would last barely 18 months before the monarchy was swept away (though the subsequent republic was short-lived). The Napoleonic threat is evoked in the opening accompanied recitative for Cerere and Pale, and in Cerere’s aria “D’un fremito indistinto”, before the prophet Cassandro reassures them of a blissful future for Daunia and its royal line.

Paisiello’s music for this exercise in dynastic flattery is amiable, prettily orchestrated and, on the whole, stubbornly unmemorable. With the right libretto – Il barbiere di Siviglia, of course, and the sentimental pastoral comedy Nina – his invention could have real charm and piquancy. Here it often falls flat. Pale’s sole aria has an agreeable, if rather wan, lyricism; and there is a mild pleasure to be had in the solo violins’ avian twitterings in Cassandro’s aria, a sinfonia concertante for voice and orchestra. But Paisiello’s melodies are short-breathed and conventional, while his restricted harmonic vocabulary is simply not up to expressing the tumult and panic of the opening scenes. Still, seekers of 18th-century operatic rarities can be assured that the performance is more than acceptable, with some lively, if sometimes less than ideally polished, playing from the Foggia period orchestra. Best among a fair-to-good cast are the soft-grained baritone Furio Zanasi, as Cassandro, and the alto Marina de Liso, warm of tone and graceful of phrase as Pale. The resonant recording, though perfectly acceptable, sets the voices rather too far back vis-à-vis the orchestra.