Call me jaded, but in a saturated marketplace any new disc of Handel arias needs careful planning. Here we have merely a randomly ordered sequence of Simone Kermes’s favourites. Potential enthusiasm was further dampened as I waded through the soprano’s own booklet note: a gushing love letter to Handel that combines unabashed self-promotion, nuggets of biography and swooning adulation (‘We know each other in a mysterious way … my guardian angel and my idol … your arias accompany my life and cast their glow over the great stages of the world’). Even diehard Kermes fans might blush. Of the dramatic context for these assorted arias – several of them little known – there is not a word. Enough said.

Kermes’s singing, as so often, provoked mixed feelings. Her diamantine coloratura is brilliantly displayed in an aria di bravura from Lotario, complete with trademark stratospheric cadenza – thrilling or wildly over the top, according to taste. She is in her element as the rampaging sorceresses Armida (in Rinaldo) and Medea (Teseo), egged on by a hyperactively strumming continuo. The Angel’s aria from La Resurrezione – the young Handel at his most flamboyant – would reduce Hell to jelly. Kermes means business, too, in Athalia’s ‘vengeance’ aria, and jousts gleefully with a pair of oboes in Pleasure’s aria from Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno.

In the slower numbers that predominate here I’m less convinced. While her soft singing is pure and even-toned, and her phrasing always expressive, Kermes is over fond of a blanched, almost crooning pianissimo, à la Bartoli: effective in moderation but in danger of sounding mannered when used as a default setting. Cleopatra’s lament ‘Piangerò’ is typical in its mooning languor. There are touching individual things, including a gently sensuous ‘Süsse Stille’ (from the collection of Nine German Arias) and Beauty’s serene final aria from The Triumph of Time and Truth, where Kermes is matched in eloquence by the solo oboist. But too often I found myself longing for less wan introversion and more sheer voice, not least in Rodelinda’s tragic prison aria with its doleful bassoon colouring.

‘An overdose of Handelian droopiness’ was my summary of the recital after the final ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’, floated on a disconsolate thread of tone. An uncharitable verdict, perhaps. There’s certainly no doubting Kermes’s skill, musicality and, in the few extrovert numbers, spitfire virtuosity. If you do investigate, be assured that Amici Veneziani are nimble and sensitive accomplices, though bass lines can boom slightly in the vast, resonant acoustic of Berlin’s Jesus-Christus-Kirche.