Following her examination of music associated with Pauline Viardot (11/22), Marina Viotti gives us Mozart arias, operatic and sacred, for her second Aparté recital. The title, ‘Mezzo Mozart’, is in fact more ambiguous than it first seems, and in the context should perhaps be followed with a question mark. Viotti herself is a high mezzo, but as she tells us in a booklet interview, the modern distinction between soprano and mezzo was unknown in Mozart’s day. Louise Villeneuve, who created Dorabella in Così fan tutte, would be dubbed a lyric soprano in today’s nomenclature. Nancy Storace, the first Susanna, was also the dedicatee of Ch’io mi scordi di te, nowadays regarded as the province of agile mezzos such as Teresa Berganza. In an intelligently laid out programme, Viotti consequently contrasts arias never intended for two different voice types with genuinely low-lying roles originally written for alto castratos (Farnace in Mitridate, re di Ponto, Ramiro in La finta giardiniera) though now, of course, very much the territory of the modern mezzo.

Her voice is bright, comfortably wide-ranging, easy at the top but sometimes lacking fullness lower down. Unlike some mezzos, she possesses a genuine high pianissimo: we hear it in Susanna’s ‘Deh vieni’, which is beautifully done, and again, most exquisitely, in the ‘Tu, virginum corona’ section of Exsultate, jubilate. Coloratura flows easily in Sesto’s ‘Parto, ma tu ben mio’ and the ‘Laudamus te’ from the C minor Mass, though her trills can sometimes be imprecise. On occasion she brings a deliberate hardness into her tone for interpretative effect. It serves her well in Farnace’s raging ‘Venga pur, minacci e frema’ but is less well suited to Dorabella’s ‘Smanie implacabili’, which sounds neurotic rather than self-dramatising.

Some of it is under-characterised. Ch’io mi scordi di te is cleanly done but short on intensity, with little sense of ‘stelle barbare, stelle spietate’ louring over the proceedings, and Exsultate, jubilate begins far too coolly, though there’s no mistaking the fire and élan she later brings to the ‘Alleluia’, capped by a thrilling top C. Gli Angeli Genève, meanwhile, play with crisp articulation and plenty of detail for their founder-conductor Stephan MacLeod: the rather dry, squeaky-clean string sound won’t, I suspect, be to everyone’s taste in Mozart, though the woodwind are as warmly expressive as one could wish.