What do you give a tenor celebrating his 60th birthday? If you’re Roberto Alagna, you naturally indulge yourself in a new album, of course. If the repertoire on this disc from Aparté was put out by a singer half Alagna’s age, you’d describe it as a calling card. In this context, however, it is perhaps a ‘what might have been’ collection of arias and songs that he’s not recorded before (apart from ‘Be My Love’ and the self-penned song from his 20s, ‘Sognare’).

The repertoire criss-crosses boundaries and borders. The best of it comes from the byways of 19th-century French opera: Gounod’s Polyeucte and Faust, Thomas’s Mignon, Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, plus Adam’s Le postillon de Lonjumeau, where Alagna exudes his trademark charm. This could have been a fertile furrow to have ploughed more during his busy career – I recall him being a persuasive advocate for Lalo’s Fiesque – but Italian repertoire has largely held sway during recent decades.

There is a brief snatch of Verdi – Gabriele Adorno’s ‘Sento avvampar’ from Simon Boccanegra – before we begin a globetrotting dash. Alagna pulled out of a 2018 Bayreuth debut but did get his Lohengrin to the stage in 2020 at the Staatsoper Berlin. He doesn’t have the most idiomatic German, but it’s interesting to hear Wagner’s most Italianate score sung with such Italianate brightness. Jontek’s aria from Stanisław Moniuszko’s Halka is a lovely nod to the heritage of Alagna’s wife, soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, and Lensky’s ‘Kuda, kuda’ (from Eugene Onegin) is genuinely touching, a role in which Alagna could well have been very successful. ‘One of the leitmotifs of my career has been that I like taking on new challenges’, notes the tenor in a booklet interview, and fair play to him for his questing sense of adventure. There’s even some Rimsky-Korsakov, the once-popular ‘Chant hindou’ from Sadko, sung here in French.

There follows a touch of Baroque – a Pergolesi number familiar from its use in Stravinsky’s Pulcinella – before a collection of songs such as Osmán Pérez Freire’s ‘¡Ay, ay, ay!’, where Alagna displays a honeyed head voice. There’s charisma by the bucketload, but there’s also no disguising the fact that some top notes are now rather effortful. His attempt to float the high C at the climax of ‘Salut! demeure chaste et pure’ doesn’t quite come off, and after a laboured cadenza, the last note of ‘Plus blanche que la blanche hermine’ has to be corrected very swiftly when the orchestra enters.

The Morphing Chamber Orchestra offer pedestrian accompaniments – conductor Giorgio Croci could have set some more alert tempos – in a cloudy acoustic, and, considering the repertoire covers seven languages, Aparté deserves a little slap on the wrist for not including any translations in the booklet. One for committed fans.