Opera Rara, founded in 1970, has been at the forefront of the rediscovery of forgotten operas for four decades. With its 40th anniversary coming up next year, it might seem there could hardly be any more worthwhile nuggets to uncover, but Opera Rara keeps on digging and the quality of its performances has never been higher.

The latest find is Donizetti’s Maria di Rohan, which scored a big success at its premiere in Vienna in 1843. If the opera is known today at all, it is in the later French version, where extra picturesque numbers were added to tickle the Parisian audience’s fancy. But Opera Rara’s concert performance on Saturday chose to give the Viennese original its first outing in the UK.

Donizetti, suffering early symptoms of the syphilis that was to kill him, set about the opera as though there was no time to lose. From the minute the curtain goes up it is all action. Like a blinkered horse heading down a racetrack, the opera hurtles along, propelled by a series of tense confrontations, to cross the finishing line in under two hours.

The result is breathless and rather wearing. Mark Elder and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment drove the music for all it was worth, getting the cut and thrust of period instruments to add to the swashbuckling energy of the story – a typical love triangle, set among duelling courtiers in the 17th-century Paris of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu.

The singers needed to work hard to flesh out their characters. Krassimira Stoyanova sang cleanly as the double-dealing Maria di Rohan, but her voice lacks the colours that might have made her predicament touching. José Bros did better as her lover Riccardo, whipping up operatic tenor passion with obvious enjoyment. With his rival, Christopher Purves’s Enrico, struggling with a bad throat, the clinching duel was a one-sided affair.

Then, just as the audience was heading out for an early journey home, Elder called them back. As a sort of encore, Stoyanova and Bros sang one of the extra numbers from the French version, a duet that is actually tuneful and rather good fun. Maybe we should not sniff at the taste of those Parisian audiences after all.