‘Arias for Marietta Marcolini: Rossini’s first muse’, runs the rubric. In his delightful, romanticising Rossini biography, Stendhal even maintained that the first great coloratura contralto and the composer were lovers. What we do know is that by the time she met the 19-year-old Rossini in 1811, Marcolini was an established star, renowned in the operas of Ferdinando Paer, the Italianised German Simon Mayr and assorted Neapolitans. Like so many others, Rossini was entranced by her vocal splendour, her dazzling agility and her gifts as a comedienne. The admiration was mutual. For La Marcolini he wrote five varied roles between 1811 and 1814, including Isabella, the wily and captivating heroine of his earliest comic masterpiece, L’italiana in Algeri.

A latter-day Swedish Marcolini here celebrates the diva’s association with Rossini alongside roles created for her by Mayr, Paer and the more obscure figures of Joseph Weigl, Giuseppe Mosca and Carlo Coccia. If the Rossini items have a melodic allure, comic élan and poignancy beyond the reach of his older contemporaries, there is charm and spirit aplenty, not least in the colourful wind obbligatos. Clarinet and voice duet soulfully at the opening of the Weigl aria, while Alcina’s scena from Mosca’s Ariosto spoof, Le bestie in uomini, becomes a bravura double concerto for mezzo and horn.

Having won plaudits in Handel and Vivaldi, Ann Hallenberg proves no less persuasive in bel canto. Just occasionally she sounds stretched in the stratosphere. But her even, gleaming tone, eloquence of phrase and fluent, never mechanical coloratura give virtually unalloyed pleasure. Nothing she does is forced or mannered. Like Marcolini, too, she is an adroit comedienne. In Isabella’s ‘Per lui che adoro’ – which like Susanna’s ‘Deh vieni’ in Figaro is at once a love song and part of a comic ruse – Hallenberg judges perfectly the shifts between sensuous grace and sly knowingness. She revels in the zany, over-the-top cabaletta of the Mosca scena, finds a deeper, bronzed tone for the girl-as-warrior heroine of Rossini’s little-known early comedy L’equivoco stravagante, while in the scene from Ciro in Babilonia she movingly catches Cyrus’s paternal tenderness before hurling volleys of furious coloratura at the tyrant. If the male chorus can sound a bit raw, the orchestral playing under the sympathetic Fabio Biondi – less hyperactive than he is in Baroque repertoire – is lively and polished, with some excellent wind obbligatos. Other mezzos in this repertoire may have richer, ampler voices than Hallenberg’s; on this evidence, few could equal her style, zest and coloratura brilliance.