Review by Uncle Dave Lewis [-] La Cecchina ossia La buona Figliuola (Cecchina, or The Good-Natured Girl; 1760) was Italian composer Niccolò Piccinni's greatest success in his native tongue; later, he competed with Christoph Willibald Gluck in Paris, and posterity has deigned Gluck the winner on that score. Nevertheless, Piccinni's work, made from a Carlo Goldoni libretto based on incidents from Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela, is of central historical value to eighteenth century opera, and it is a pity that this Memories release is the most traveled of the three recordings made of it. Led by conductor Bruno Campanella and featuring Maria Angeles Peters in the lead role, the package rather unscrupulously avoids identifying the opera company that gave this performance in the summer of 1990, but it is most likely the Teatro Regio di Torino. In a superficial way, the sound is better than is the standard for pirated opera; it may have been made from the prompter's box or from the seat of an especially fidgety audience member. There is, however, a constant racket going on in this recording: either footfalls from the stage, shifting in a seat, occasional hushed exclamations from the recordist, and so on. What it might be doesn't matter; what does matter is that all of this extraneous noise and racket provides such a high level of distraction that it is impossible to concentrate on the music or the quality of the performance. Among the two alternatives, the Bongiovanni recording under Vito Paternoster is the most likely candidate for something preferable. However, by comparison this recording simply isn't a good value for anyone's money.