It is welcome to have on the Naxos budget label a collection of Italian soprano arias as attractive as this delightful disc. Maria Luigia Borsi is a new name to me, but here is a young, sweet-toned lyric soprano able to float pianissimos in the highest register to ravishing effect. The six Puccini arias that take up the greater part of the disc, starting with Butterfly’s ‘Un bel dì vedremo’, are all enchantingly done, including Doretta’s aria from the unjustly neglected La rondine, with the soprano line going higher and higher in a heavenly way. They end inevitably with ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Gianni Schicchi.

It is good also to have the lovely scena by Respighi, Il tramonto (‘The Sunset’), atmospherically done, a substantial item of some 15 minutes. Marginally longer still is what I treasure most of all on the disc, the excerpt from Act 4 of Verdi’s Otello, including the Willow Song leading into the Ave Maria, Desdemona’s final words. The performance that Borsi gives is not just ravishingly beautiful but has a dramatic intensity that suggests that this is a role Borsi has made her own onstage. The shading of the repeated cries of ‘Salce’ in the Willow Song, ever softer, could not be more moving, while at the other end of the dynamic spectrum the agonised A sharp sung fortissimo before the Ave Maria is thrillingly precise, without a hint of any upwards scooping. It is luxury casting to have the LSO crisply conducted by Yves Abel.