It’s difficult to think of a more unlikely place where sheep might safely graze than in the steely discomfort of the Royal Opera’s Linbury Studio Theatre. So it was a little disconcerting to hear a babble of baaing and bleating as one took one’s seat for a celebratory production of Mozart’s early opera Il re pastore.

The woolly members of the cast and their recorded voices didn’t stay around long, though. In this two-act “Serenata”, as Mozart called it, the time-honoured themes of court and country, peace and war are rehearsed as the poor shepherd Aminta all but loses his Elisa on discovering that he was born a king — and that Alexander the Great, no less, wants him crowned in order to set up a reign of peace.

In the Linbury’s tiny space, it wasn’t only sheep that shared the stage. It is ironic, really, that a short evening entertainment which its dedicatee, Archduke Maximillian, had described in his diary as a mere “musique-concert” should, in this day of impoverished concert performances, be staged so fully and so fussily. John Lloyd Davies’s thoughtful production all but drowned in its own dramaturgy.

Not only was the stage cluttered with antique remnants, spears and a huge prostrate goblet which doubled as a shepherd’s cave; but no fewer than 11 pastorals by Poussin were successively projected as backdrops. And, just in case we failed to perceive the thrust of any given aria, a series of epigrams by Goethe was also flashed up for our edification. “He is happiest, king or peasant, who finds peace in his own home.”

Well, yes, they do fit irresistibly into the scheme of things. But with a cast as strong as this team from the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Young Artists Programme, they did seem an unnecessary distraction.

King and peasant in one, the originally male soprano role of Aminta was sung gloriously by Katie Van Kooten: her soprano shaped and gilded a beautiful accompanied recitative with shades of Gluck’s Che farò, and made exquisite chamber music with the plangent violins of the English Baroque Soloists as the shepherd-king made clear that he could not rule without the support of the woman he loved. Edward Gardner, English National Opera’s music director-elect, was in the pit, robustly supportive of the ever-developing vocal muscle of young Ana James’s Elisa, and of the right royal double-act of the eloquent tenor Robert Murray and the pearly soprano of Anna Leese as Agenor and Tamiri. Peter Bronder blustered and blessed their unions as the warlike Alessandro.

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