Jeanine De Bique impressed me recently with her assured singing as La Folie in William Christie’s Platée (Harmonia Mundi, 12/21), but athletic as Rameau’s mickey-take of French opera is, I would not have guessed from it that she had in her the dazzling virtuosity she lets loose in the aria from Graun’s Cesare e Cleopatra that opens this, her first recital album. A barrage of fast passagework, machine-gun repeated notes and leaps on high which she carries off with clarity, focus, rapidity and swagger while never letting go of her rounded and securely supported tone, it is the perfect opener to a Baroque opera singer’s showcase. Yet in case we should fear that this is how it is all going to be, we are then tipped straight into the surpassing sophistication and nobility of Handel’s operatic world in ‘Se pietà’ from Giulio Cesare – the aria in which Cleopatra first realises that she can love someone other than herself – shaped and nurtured by De Bique with swelling emotional conviction and care for text.

A triumph already in just these two numbers, then, and perhaps the most striking demonstration of the album’s connecting principle (devised by musicologist Yannis François, who similarly aided Jakub Józefński on his recent albums), which is to pair arias by Handel with treatments by other composers of the same characters – Cleopatra obviously, but also Rodelinda and Deidamia. Two other ‘mirrorings’ – namely Agrippinas Younger (Handel) and Elder (Telemann), and an aria text for Morgana from Broschi’s L’isola d’Alcina which Handel reassigned to Alcina herself – are more oblique, but still serve their purpose in providing De Bique with a rich vein of superb arias (some recorded for the first time) that also present a fascinating show of differing operatic manners: Graun’s north German nervous energy, Telemann’s elegance, Manna’s Neapolitan expansiveness and poise, Broschi’s simple but affecting melody, Handel’s supreme subtlety of detail.

The promise of De Bique’s first two arias carries through the whole recital. Her commitment to these arias is complete, and she realises the individual character of each so successfully that every one feels like a discovery. It also means that we never tire of her voice, as can sometimes happen with albums like this. Concerto Köln under Luca Quintavalle play superbly for her, like musicians possessed and loving every second of it. A wonderfully made programme that turns both its musicological mining and its high-powered performances to sheer pleasure.