Baked-on fans of Nino Rota will have likely succumbed to the charms of Il Cappello Di Paglia Di Firenze (The Florentine Straw Hat), the third of the Italian composer’s 10 operas.

If they are lucky, they might have the LPs of Rota’s own long-deleted recording on RCA (now retailing at $188 on Amazon used and new!). If not, they may have had to make do with a poorly recorded – probably pirated – live version with Magda Oliviero and Mariella Devia, which made it onto CD a while back (also, now deleted and going for $90).

Thankfully, the release of this fine new studio version on the ever-enterprising German label Capriccio changes all that.

Rota composed his opera – in English, often called The Italian Straw Hat – in Bari, shortly after the end of WWII with no specific performance in mind. The libretto, by the composer and his mother Ernesta Rota Rinaldi, is based on Un chapeau de paille d’Italie, an 1851 Parisian farce by Eugène Labiche and Marc-Michel. It would be 10 years before the opera had...