A prime selling point here is the premiere recording of an early version of the soprano cantata Tu fedel? Tu costante?, HWV171a, unearthed in Ton Koopman’s private manuscript collection and authenticated by the American musicologist John Roberts. Probably composed in Florence or Venice in 1706, near the start of Handel’s glittering Italian sojourn, the ‘new’ cantata initially follows the course of the familiar version, HWV171 (with oboe added to the string band), then goes its own way. While the text, a woman’s taunting of her rustic Lothario, is the same, the music of this newly discovered version is more wistful, even sorrowful in cast, epitomised by the plangent siciliano aria ‘Se Licori, Filli ed io’.

Encouraged by the graceful, animated playing of Koopman’s period band, Yetzabel Arias Fernandez deploys her ‘straight’, slightly mezzo-ish soprano with taste and refinement. If her singing is never less than enjoyable, I rather wish that she’d carried some of the temperament she reveals in the recitatives into the arias. Sharper Italian consonants would have helped; and while Handel’s music might suggest an undercurrent of pain, there should surely be a streak of defiance in the final aria, where the woman threatens to find another lover if her philandering Fileno doesn’t reform.

The other Italian cantatas on offer, each one a miniature unstaged opera, all give pleasure. That stalwart Baroque bass Klaus Mertens, clean, slightly dry of tone, always musical, vividly limns the cynical or suffering lovers in Dalla guerra amorosa and Cuopre tal volta il cielo – though I don’t care for his habit of ‘yawning’ into sustained notes. Fernandez is spirited and sensitive to mood in Aure soave, e liete, where love, typically in these cantatas, is a malign force, and spars delightedly with recorder in Pensieri notturni, with some deft yodelling en route. All the while the Amsterdam players are a buoyant presence, whether in the energising continuo or the beautifully turned obbligatos from oboe, recorder and solo violins.