Gluck's Il Trionfo di Clelia is something of a curio. It dates from 1763, a year after the premiere of Orfeo ed Euridice, and though there are passages that echo the latter's revolutionary, pared-down style, it marks a return to the formalities of opera seria, with lots of secco recitative and big da capo arias.

The libretto draws on narratives of the founding of the Roman republic. Clelia, held hostage by the Etruscan King Porsenna, who is besieging Rome in an attempt to restore the expelled Tarquinian royal family, escapes on horseback, then swims the Tiber in order to assist her lover, Orazio, in fighting for the city's freedom. Impressed by the virtue she embodies, Porsenna eventually abandons the siege.

The subject was familiar in the 17th and 18th centuries when it was used, most famously by the French novelist Madeleine de Scudéry, as a guarded critique of absolute monarchy. Nigel Lowery's production for the recently formed Tutti all'Opera breaks with its political associations, however, by reimagining the opera in terms of the rise of 20th-century totalitarianism.

Porsenna (Vassilis Kavayas) and Tarquinio (Irini Karaianni) look like late-19th-century statesmen, while Orazio (Mary-Ellen Nesi) and Clelia (Hélène Le Corre) wear quasi-fascist uniforms. "Think of Rome and think of me," Orazio sings as he burns books on a pyre. It all sits very uneasily with the nobility of Gluck's music.

There are strong performances. Nesi and Kavayas both have an immaculate sense of line and an ability to hurl coloratura about like weaponry. Le Corre, however, can be monochrome in her steely determination. There's shapely playing, meanwhile, from the City of London Sinfonia under Giuseppe Sigismondi di Risio.