With Mark Elder installed as artistic director, Opera Rara continues to burrow away in the byways of the 19th-century French and Italian repertoires, and its latest offering is a slight but charming opéra comique by Gounod.

La Colombe (The Dove) was composed in 1860, a couple of years after Gounod completed his most enduringly popular stage work, Faust. Based on a story by the 17th-century fabulist La Fontaine, which itself can be traced back to a Sanskrit source, it’s a modest four-hander about a wealthy countess, Sylvie, who is desperate to gain possession of a dove belonging to one of her young admirers, the penniless Horace, so that she can compete with one of her rivals, who owns a talking parrot. Horace steadfastly refuses to sell his bird, but eventually he is forced to contemplate killing it to provide dinner for the countess. At the meal the countess is horrified to discover the sacrifice he’s prepared to make for her, but all ends happily when it’s revealed that the bird they have eaten is in fact her rival’s parrot.

La Colombe is clearly not a profound work, but it is well filled with the kind of ingratiating tunes that Gounod could turn out so effectively. Elder’s performance has just the right light touch too, always keeping its tongue ever so slightly in its cheek, and the dialogue (tactfully shortened, I suspect) goes with an easy fluency.

Erin Morley is Sylvie, tripping delicately through the coloratura with which Gounod adorns the central role, and the tenor Javier Camarena is the doting Horace, while the two flunkies are sung by the mezzo Michèle Losier and (luxury casting indeed) Laurent Naouri. Modest though it is, a rarity like this couldn’t be served much better by a recording.