Stoyanova’s second recital disc for Orfeo lies more on the soprano’s ‘home’ territory and includes two arias by fellow Bulgarian 20th-century composers Veselin Stoyanov and Parashkev Hadjiev. Stoyanova’s solid technique and distinctive ability to characterise more through vocal intensity than colour suits a repertoire which constitutes a guide to Slavonic melancholy – from Borodin’s Yaroslavna via Tchaikovsky’s Maria and Lisa to Dvorák’s Rusalka and Xenia and Rimsky’s Marfa.

Tatiana is an Eliza Doolittle role of two distinct parts. Stoyanova’s success earlier this year onstage in Amsterdam (under Mariss Jansons, to be released on DVD) suggests that her weight of voice and presence are more suited to the Princess Gremina half of the evening. But the version of the Onegin Letter Scene with which she begins this disc has needlepoint accuracy and a well-scanned emotional range. Similarly, in Rusalka, she sounds more emotionally at home with the later lament (abandoned by the mortal prince, unable to return to her natural spirit world) than in the young water-sprite’s invocation of the moon, but the latter is carried with off with aplomb and instinctive pacing. As the tragic Lisa (The Queen of Spades), the mad, poisoned Marfa (The Tsar’s Bride) and the doomed Xenia (Dimitrij, Dvorák’s Boris Godunov, still little known here), Stoyanova truly has the grand style, both in fearless voice and dramatic impersonation.

At first Pavel Baleff’s conducting sounded rather remote, efficient but lacking the last degree of wind-up that many of these arias seem, especially to Western ears, to call for. But with time it’s clear that this fits Stoyanova’s interpretative tactics like a glove. Sound and balance are excellent. The booklet provides an unpredictable interview with the singer, Western transliterations of the sung texts and plot summaries but regrettably no translations.