All essentials for a recital are present here: the featured artist in good voice, imagination capable of bringing 13 different characters to life unseen (sometimes, as in the case of Tchaikovsky’s Duke Robert, in barely three minutes), apt recording decisions and on-the-pace accompaniment. Following hard on the heels of his collaboration on last year’s “Midsummer Night” with Kate Royal (7/09), ENO music chief Edward Gardner certainly delivers the last of these, this time with the LPO, a frequent Chandos project partner.

Both Gerald Finley and Gardner are natural time-travellers in lyric theatre, be it in the imaginative choice of Antonio’s “Ambo nati in questa valle” from Linda di Chamounix (one of several Donizetti operas now returning to the repertoire) or in Richard Rodgers’s “Some enchanted evening”. The latter is set here as a kind of encore and nestles well musically next to Puccini’s treatment of Scarpia’s wholly different kind of love. Its performance epitomises this programme: unafraid to be romantic where necessary, but with a just blend of control and detail to make one hearing not enough.

The range of music covered gives the Canadian baritone the chance to give quite a calling-card of his stage work. There is much imaginative detail in Iago’s Credo (a complete recording with Finley is soon due from LSO Live), Lysiart (in the self-pitying vengeance aria that Wagner rehotted-up for Telramund in Lohengrin), the Donizetti, and the deceptively tricky Tosca Act1 finale pitched at a convincingly monumental tempo. Only in Hans Sachs’s final address does an uncompelling English translation and a slender choral sound limit the impact of Finley’s work.

Finally, as John Steane’s informative and witty note reminds us, there are two of what used to be called “creator records”. In the emotional John Donne-based reverie from John Adams’s Doctor Atomic (where Finley was the first J Robert Oppenheimer) the singer is superb and the glittering orchestration well caught by orchestra and engineers. Then by way of complete contrast, there’s Mark Anthony Turnage’s The Silver Tassie, Finley in his bitter-sweet role of Harry Heegan.