If you’re watching the calories, stop reading now. This evocative collection of Viennese sweetmeats, of wine, women, song and Sachertorte, does not countenance the notion of abstinence. Kaufmann’s love affair with Vienna – City of Dreams – was born in the Tyrol (his grandparents’ farm) and carried through to operatic stardom. His first professional production was an operetta – Strauss’s A Night in Venice – and he embraces the style, the timbre, the allure, even the specific accent of this repertoire with complete conviction and self-evident delight.

The great thing about these performances is that they sound ‘lived in’. The trick in performing Viennese operetta and Viennese chansons (and this selection has been shrewdly chosen across both) is surely that they don’t sound ‘artful’ but rather that the impression is of their slipping off the vocal chords, spontaneous, relaxed and over-easy. The range here is from numbers born into a cabaret style like Hans May’s ‘Heute ist der schönste Tag in mein Leben’ and Hermann Leopoldi’s ‘In einem kleinen Café in Hernals’ (where Kaufmann might be enjoying a slice of Kardinalschnitte) to the full tenorial voluptuousness of the Korngold version of ‘Sei mir gegrüsst, du holdes Venezia’ from A Night in Venice and ‘Zwei Märchenaugen’ from Kálmán’s Die Zirkusprinzessin (‘The Circus Princess’), which abounds in zigeuner heat and is described by Kaufmann as operetta’s answer to Pagliacci’s Canio. It’s in numbers such as this where one forgets that maybe there were fine details that Kaufmann might have finessed more deftly a few years back, and one is eternally grateful for his beefy, darkening tone.

There is so much to savour here – but above all it’s the stylistic understanding (and in this experience and hindsight are invaluable) that carries all before it. There is a oneness, too, with his collaborators – Adám Fischer and the inimitable Vienna Philharmonic, their oft-swooning strings festooning the voice in Robert Stolz’s utterly gorgeous ‘Im Prater blühn wieder die Bäume’. I love, too, Carl Zeller’s ‘Schenkt man sich Rosen in Tirol’, with its super-catchy chorus, and Weinberger’s ‘Du wärst für mich die Frau gewesen’, where Kaufmann’s seductive head-voice is sexily shadowed by solo violin. By contrast, we are in darker Kurt Weillian territory with the despondent, really bittersweet Hans May number ‘Es wird im Leben dir mehr genommen als gegeben’.

Oh, and fear not, Lehár’s Widow waltzes in (along with soprano Rachel Willis-Sørenson) for ‘Lippen schweigen’, one of the very great tunes, one for the ages – all ages.