Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra was an important turning point, both in Rossini’s career and in the development of serious opera in 19th-century Italy. Simon Mayr had laid some useful foundations, but it was the arrival of the 23-year-old Rossini in Naples in 1815 that changed everything. Having evolved radical new forms for the making of opera buffa, the young superstar was well placed to effect a similar transition with opera seria, conjuring up a new kind of opera, classically ordered but Romantically driven. All he needed were the resources, which Naples’s Teatro San Carlo had in abundance: the finest singers in Italy, the finest opera orchestra and a literary culture within Naples itself that over the next seven years would furnish Rossini with texts drawn from several of Europe’s most influential writers – Tasso, Shakespeare, Racine and the fashionable Walter Scott.

Equally fashionable – Anglomania being rife in 1814‑15 as Napoleon was finally brought to heel – was an early mistress of the Gothic novel, Sophia Lee, whose historical romance The Recess provided Neapolitan court poet Giovanni Schmidt with the story he needed for Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra. It’s a neatly told tale of the ill-advised marriage by Elizabeth’s favourite soldier, the Earl of Leicester, to a young Scotswoman, the daughter, it later turns out, of Mary Queen of Scots. This, needless to say, is music to the ears of Leicester’s erstwhile friend, now bitter rival, the Duke of Norfolk.

The opera had its prima in Naples in October 1815 and remained in the company’s repertory for many years. Its first English performance was at London’s Haymarket Theatre in 1818. The French soprano Joséphine Fodor-Mainvielle sang Elizabeth in a cast that included the original Norfolk, Manuel García. And it was in London in 1975 that the opera received what remains its finest complete recording: a Philips set, conducted by Gianfranco Masini and produced by Erik Smith, with Montserrat Caballé as Elisabetta.

Revivals during the 1970s were a chapter of accidents. These began with an ill-considered Palermo staging that bored the pants off audiences at the 1972 Edinburgh Festival, and continued with the various mishaps that surrounded the 1975 Aix Festival staging (in the open-air Théâtre Antique in Arles of all places) on which the Philips recording was based.

Aix lost two of its four principal singers: the Leicester of José Carreras – happily available for the recording – and Ileana Cotrubas, who was to have sung the role of Matilde. In an inspired substitution, ENO’s Valerie Masterson was cast as Matilde, both for the Arles performances and for the recording as well.

As I say, Elisabetta is classically ordered yet Romantically driven. It’s a precarious balance to strike, something the Philips performance and recording did to perfection but which the heftier 2002 Opera Rara set rather failed to do.

As for this 2021 Rossini in Wildbad production, recorded in Kraków, home of the none-too-subtle Kraków Philharmonic, it’s a write-off where the opera is concerned, though not without interest for the appearance of Congolese tenor Patrick Kabongo, whose portrayal of Leicester sits well alongside those of Carerras or Opera Rara’s Bruce Ford. The Elisabetta, Serena Farnocchia, is no Caballé, but she’s an experienced performer who knows her way around the role.

Wildbad’s music director, Antonino Fogliani, conducts what Naxos’s back-of‑the-box blurb calls a ‘fast-moving production’. You can say that again. Keen to sweep on at any available opportunity, it’s conducting that drains the piece of all impact and charm. No wonder the end-of-act applause from the Kraków audience is tepid to the point of being impolite.