This is the second staging by the Rossini in Wildbad Festival of L’occasione fa il ladro, the richly freighted one-act comedy that, along with Il signor Bruschino, brought to a close young Rossini’s two-year association with Venice’s Teatro San Moisè during the winter of 1812 13.

Adapted from a one-act vaudeville by Rossini’s precociously talented French contemporary Eugène Scribe, the plot centres on what would nowadays be called identity theft. This, after the luggage of a young aristocrat, travelling to Naples to meet for the first time his wealthy bride-to-be, is mixed up with that of an enterprising ne’er-do-well, Don Parmenione, who decides to impersonate the now shabbily suited and passport-bereft count. Since the bride-to-be has also switched identities with her maid Ernestina, the better to assess the temper of her allotted husband, the comic pump is well and truly primed.

The opera never entirely fell out of favour, not least because of the lure of the role of Count Alberto to many an aspiring young tenore di grazia. One such was the 22-year-old Alessandro Bonci, who won a reputation as Alberto during the Rossini centenary celebrations in Pesaro in 1892. And the fascination continues. One of the principal reasons for acquiring the two-CD, budget-price Naxos recording of the earlier, 2005 Wildbad staging is the Alberto of Garar Thór Cortes, the gifted Icelandic tenore di grazia, a notable Raoul in Phantom of the Opera, who has since been largely lost to the crossover business.

The opera was fully rehabilitated in 1987 with the arrival of a new Critical Edition, alongside a gloriously inventive Pesaro Festival staging by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. (There was also a charming revival at that year’s Buxton Festival, sung in English with Jean Rigby as a memorable Ernestina.) However, it’s Michael Hampe’s 1992 Cologne production – part of a bicentennial staging of four of Rossini’s early Venetian farse, co-produced with the Schwetzingen Festival and filmed by NVC Arts – that remains with us today.

That entire cycle has just been reissued as an astonishingly affordable five-DVD set from EuroArts. The L’occasione would give any new account a run for its money, let alone one as dire as this 2017 Rossini in Wildbad staging – an ‘in-house’ production that’s little more than a semi-staged concert performance with minimal scenery, basic lighting, and limited sound resources eccentrically deployed. You will have seen better productions at your local school.

Had this been a CD release, it might have challenged Naxos’s earlier Wildbad account. Antonino Fogliani’s conducting is tauter than it was in 2005 and the cast, Lorenzo Regazzo’s Parmenione apart, is decent enough. Regazzo knows the role but he’s not a stage comic in the class of, say, Alfonso Antoniozzi. Watching him cavorting around the stage in this largely directionless production, you realise why his singing becomes so slapdash at times.

The most musically satisfying L’occasione on record is the 1992 London-made Claves studio recording (5/93, download only), strongly cast and judiciously led by Marcello Viotti, a fine young conductor, sadly no longer with us. As things currently stand, however, it’s the reissued Schwetzingen DVD that promises to be the recording of choice for some time to come.