This isn’t exactly a new recording, but it’s still the only version of Salieri’s Parisian opera-spectacle, with a libretto by the fashionably outrageous Beaumarchais, of Figaro fame. How greatly it enhances their reputations, though, is questionable.

Tarare, the eponymous hero of this pseudo-oriental farrago of abductions, disguises, fiendish plots, improbable nobility and last-minute rescues, is also an old French term roughly equivalent to the English ‘taradiddle’ – nonsense, hot air. This suggests the spirit in which Beaumarchais approached it – a colourfully improbable comedy-drama with an elementary political message designed to tax neither the wit nor the attention span of his audience and requiring Salieri to subjugate his music to the words, in the spirit of the composer’s admired mentor, Gluck.

Salieri obligingly blurred the traditional recitative/aria form into a much more flowing unity, almost through-composed, in which declamatory recitative with orchestral accompaniment links a sequence of very short arioso numbers, often only a minute or two long, with a minimum of ensembles and self-contained songs.

The effect is original although, unfortunately, while Salieri churns out a constantly agreeable stream of noble phrasing, buffo jollity and languishing soprano lines, none of it is remotely memorable. The form seems to cramp his modest melodic gifts, falling far short of his likeable Falstaff. Significantly, when Salieri created a version for Vienna, revised and stripped of Beaumarchais’s political preachings by Da Ponte, no less, he substantially recomposed it along more conventional and melodically memorable lines; this has become rather better known, as Axur, re d’Ormuz. After a successful season or two, Tarare faded into complete obscurity for nearly two centuries.

This 1988 Schwetzingen Festival staging, decently recorded, certainly makes a lively case for the original, even if the playing is not always as refined as we expect from period-instrument bands these days. Once past Beaumarchais’s leadenly portentous prologue, foreshadowing the Revolutionary era’s synthetic cults of Nature and Reason, Jean-Louis Martinoty’s staging is suitably colourful and campy, and played for all it’s worth by excellent principals.

Howard Crook’s elegant if rather bloodless tone is well suited to the put-upon Tarare’s lines, while Eberhard Lorenz is vocally sprightly and physically light-footed as the mincing, harlequin-like Chief Eunuch Calpigi, supposedly a former opera castrato! His flirtatious wife Spinette is a more striking role than the nominal heroine Astasie, but they’re enjoyably sung by Anna Caleb and Zehava Gal respectively. Nicolas Rivenq is a splendidly slimy High Priest, Arthénée. But the best singing comes from Jean-Philippe Lafont’s jovial villain, Atar, blustering in splendidly buffo style. Some of the lesser singers are definitely lesser, though not impossibly so. Jean-Claude Malgoire conducts with evident commitment, but this is still a very long three hours for such slender musical reward.