Lest we British get too proprietorial about Handel, it’s worth remembering that his oratorio casts were cosmopolitan right to the end. His favoured soprano from 1748 onwards was the Italian Giulia Frasi, whom her friend (and possibly teacher) Charles Burney praised for her ‘sweet and clear voice’ and a ‘smooth and chaste style of singing which, though cold and unimpassioned, pleased natural ears’. Duly exploiting her vocal sweetness, Handel composed a raft of superb roles for Frasi, from the two queens in Solomon to Iphis in his final oratorio, Jephtha. An all-Handel-Frasi disc must have been a tempting proposition for Ruby Hughes. Yet in collaboration with Laurence Cummings and Gramophone’s David Vickers, she ranges well beyond Handel to explore a clutch of mellifluous arias for Frasi by composers on the cusp of the Baroque and the galant. These have been edited for performance by Vickers, who also provides a typically informative note. I was especially struck by a melancholy minuet song from Arne’s Artaxerxes and a beguiling sleep scene, with softly duetting bassoons, from Rebecca by Handel’s one-time pupil and assistant John Christopher Smith.

In a personal note, Ruby Hughes pays tribute to La Frasi and the ‘lyrical ease’ of the music Handel wrote for her; and it is no accident that three of her Handel oratorio roles, Susanna, Theodora and Iphis, were spotless ‘sentimental’ heroines in the mould of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. With her limpid purity of tone, immaculately even coloratura and graceful sense of style, Hughes is in many ways ideal in this repertoire. She is never less than touching, whether in Susannna’s exquisite pastoral ‘Crystal streams’, Theodora’s prison scene or the aching pathos of Iphis’s ‘Farewell, ye limpid springs’. Here and in, say, a charmingly scored (with solo cello) aria from Vincenzo Ciampi’s Adriano in Siria, she excels in dreamy inwardness.

I could leave it at that, and add that the OAE provide sensitively coloured accompaniments (a pity that the excellent instrumental soloists remain unnamed). Yet at times I wished Hughes had dared more tonal variety, more decisive characterisation. Taking her cue, perhaps, from Frasi’s ‘smooth and chaste style’, she hardly sounds imperious in a vengeance aria from Arne’s Alfred – not for the only time, more incisive consonants would have helped here. Nor do I hear much sensuous enticement in Pleasure’s ‘There the brisk sparkling nectar drain’ from The Choice of Hercules. And for all the fragile tenderness Hughes brings to ‘Farewell, ye limpid springs’, I wish she had found a fuller, warmer tone for Iphis’s vision of paradise at the close. But pleasures in this disc far outweigh these provisos. The gentle beauty of Hughes’s voice, deployed with unfailing taste, can hardly fail to give pleasure, the music – not least the Queen of Sheba’s valedictory ‘Will the sun forget to streak’ – often touches the sublime, while the non-Handel items will come as delightful discoveries to many.