‘It was really enough, more than enough. The entire performance was like an idolatrous orgy; everyone acted there as if he’d been bitten by a tarantula.’ That was in Vienna in 1822, and there’s a whiff of that about this exuberant 2019 Rossini in Wildbad festival revival of the comic-heroic romp Rossini found himself writing for the 1821 Rome Carnival. Not that this original Rome version is the same as the revised, all-Rossini Matilde di Shabran that had its prima in Naples nine months later, and would be the source of one of the great recent Rossini recordings (Decca, 10/06), now unaccountably deleted.

The facts about the Rome original, frequently misunderstood, are these. Arriving way behind schedule after seeing into production his monumental new Naples opera Maometto II, albeit with a pre-agreed subject in mind, Rossini found himself confronted by a sprawling, action-packed libretto that the ridiculously tight schedule made it impossible to rework.

He never did manage to reduce the opera’s length, though, amazingly, the 125-minute first act – the same length, famously, as the first act of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung – was completed in time for the scheduled prima on February 24. This first act is largely the same in both versions. True, the cavatina of Isidoro, the itinerant troubadour, contains a passage casually lifted from Figaro’s ‘Largo al factotum’. But Rossini rewrote that soon afterwards.

Act 2, however, is a different matter. Pressed for time, Rossini co-opted fellow composer Giovanni Pacini. Neither Pacini movement – a trio and a duet – can be said to work dramatically, as Rossini himself probably anticipated when reading the libretto. Nor was he happy with his own decision to assign the second act’s sublime horn-led lament to the bass, Raimondo, father of the imprisoned Edoardo, rather than to Edoardo himself, the en travesti mezzo. Wildbad’s Shi Zong copes nobly with the piece, though both he and the solo horn make heavy weather of a scene which in the Edoardo-led Naples revision is a thing of rare pathos and beauty.

What the Rome version does have is the opera’s only solo number for its virulently misogynistic anti-hero Corradino, finely realised here by Michele Angelini. Sadly, Rossini had taken this from Ricciardo e Zoraide (Naples, 1818), a self-borrowing that made it a no-no where the Naples completion of Matilde was concerned.

That completion arrived on the modern stage at the 1996 Pesaro Festival, using Jürgen Selk’s draft Critical Edition, and featuring as Corradino a little-known 23-year-old Peruvian tenor, Juan Diego Flórez. Flórez quickly made the part his own, with particular triumphs in Pesaro in 2004, source of the Decca recording, and at Covent Garden in 2008.

Angelini, Wildbad’s latest Corradino – there was an earlier one in 1998 (Bongiovanni, 8/00 – nla) – is pretty good, hampered only by the failure of the DeutschlandRadio Kultur recording to keep the stage performers consistently on mike, as they are in Michael Seberich’s almost studio-quality Decca set. Corradino’s fearsome first appearance – as viscerally charged an entry as that of any tenor before Verdi’s Otello – is as nothing when the singer sounds as if he’s barely left the greenroom.

The Catalan-born soprano Sara Blanch is an excellent Matilde, with the French mezzo-soprano Lamia Beuque giving stellar support as Countess d’Arco, Matilde’s grouchy rival for Corradino’s affections. The Edoardo, Russian mezzo Victoria Yarovaya, is not entirely at ease with the role, though this is less of a problem here, given that it wasn’t until Naples that the character was fully fleshed out.

Fortunately, the opera’s three great set-piece ensembles – the powerful Act 1 quartet, the even finer Act 1 quintet (after which, rightly, the audience goes wild), and the epic Act 2 sextet – are the same in both versions. It’s here that conductor José Miguel Pérez-Sierra is at his best, galvanising into action his admirable chorus and not-so-admirable orchestra. That said, he overdrives the stretta to the sextet, one of a pair of fleet-of-foot movements Rossini was more than happy to refashion for use in Le Comte Ory.