Among Handel’s cantatas, those for alto voice are even more neglected than the soprano ones, so this CD containing four for alto is welcome. Two are previously unrecorded, Irene, idolo mio and Fra pensieri quel pensiero: both from the Italian period, they are to typical amorous texts – the first an appeal to a disdainful beauty, the second about thoughts of love flying to the beloved.

Neither is an exceptional piece – each has movements where there is more interest in the bass line than the vocal one – but Marie-Nicole Lemieux sings them pleasingly and straightforwardly. She shows greater passion in the other two, which offer richer opportunities – for example in the spirited outer movements of Mi palpita il cor and in the central one of Lungi da me, where the agitated protagonist tries to dismiss troubling thoughts.

Lemieux isn’t perhaps totally at home in the expression of Handel’s stormy music, and there are times in all these pieces where I feel she doesn’t shape a phrase or a line quite idiomatically or gracefully (she is not a Baroque specialist). There are one or two slightly gusty moments. But this is good, clean and rhythmic singing, with a nicely concentrated if not specially individual tone, but with a very well-formed and interesting lower register.

The Flute Sonata is the early one, not in the Op 1 set, which, however, has music foreshadowing Op 1 No 11 and the D major Violin Sonata; it is rather blandly done here. Luc Beauséjour plays a harpsichord version of the Water Music Air and the E major Suite from the first set of 1720, some of it a little mechanically, although in the Allemande there is considerable delicacy as well as subtle details of timing.