Dorothea Röschmann has sung all the Mozart roles represented here at either the Vienna Staatsoper, the Metropolitan Opera, or both. With one exception, she brings a subtle dramatic understanding to each of these women and, where apt, lives them with no-holds-barred intensity. Her voice, darker, more ‘hooded’ than a decade ago, is not conventionally beautiful. If you seek elegance of execution in the notoriously taxing scales and arpeggios of Elvira’s ‘Mi tradì’, then look elsewhere – say, to Sena Jurinac or Soile Isokoski. But Röschmann turns the slight edge on her tone to advantage in a performance that mingles tenderness, fire and neurotic obsessiveness. Despite a rather deliberate tempo, Elettra’s ‘mad scene’ in Idomeneo exudes both fury and a desolate, broken grandeur, epitomised by her colouring of the repeated ‘dolore’. I don’t hear much feminine seductiveness as Vitellia reduces Sesto to jelly in ‘Deh, se piacer mi vuoi’. Yet Röschmann leaves you in no doubt – not least with her formidable chest tones – of the would-be Empress’s ruthlessness and overweening pride.

While she always excels when portraying extreme emotional states, grace and tranquillity do not fall easily within her expressive orbit. The one real disappointment here is Ilia’s song to the breezes, ‘Zeffiretti lusinghieri’ – a crucial oasis of serenity in the opera – where the tempo feels heavy, the style effortful. In ‘Porgi amor’ and the opening section of ‘Dove sono’, both cruel tests of intonation, Röschmann tends to sing slightly under the note, though in compensation she evidently feels the Countess’s predicament deeply, and phrases and colours with eloquence. Under Daniel Harding, the Swedish orchestra provides incisive, rhythmically alert accompaniments, with more than a nod to period performance practice.

Most impressive of all are the two final tracks, the (partially) chastened Vitellia’s scena of remorse, where Röschmann triumphantly scales the music’s fearful heights and depths (beautiful playing from the claret-toned basset-horn here), and one of Mozart’s most penetrating concert arias, Bella mia fiamma. Mozart wrote this for the Prague soprano Josepha Duschek, who allegedly locked him in her summer house until he’d finished it. Mozart retaliated by insisting that she sight-read it, having slyly inserted some of the most tortuous progressions he ever wrote. Röschmann flawlessly negotiates the chromatic minefields and brings a moving humanity to this scene of a man awaiting his death, culminating in a climax of terrifying desperation.