Venera Gimadieva burst on to the UK scene as Violetta in Glyndebourne’s 2014 production of La traviata (since issued by Opus Arte on DVD/Blu-ray, 11/15). She was glamorous, rich-voiced and beguiling, if not ultimately – for me at least – that moving as Verdi’s consumptive heroine. Here, on her debut album, we get a sense of the same virtues applied to repertoire by an early generation of Italian composers.

It’s significant, however, that the most successful performance on the disc is in Desdemona’s 20-minute scene from Rossini’s Otello, where, helped by sensitive support from the Hallé Orchestra and her mezzo and tenor colleagues, she is moving and noble, the voice powerful, dark-toned but with an appealing hint of edge. Even here, though, where the line remains relatively unruffled by the coloratura activity we get elsewhere through the disc, one gets a sense of Gimadieva’s shortcomings: occasional problems with intonation and a lack of polish when agility is called for.

She makes for an appealing – and appealingly steely – Giulietta on the opening track but elsewhere on the album the tuning is increasingly a problem, a beat developing higher up in the voice, where Gimadieva’s soprano can also become a little breathy and lose its sheen. She lacks agility in Amenaide’s aria from Tancredi, for example, becoming yelpy in the coloratura, and we find her sagging and sounding tired in Amina’s scene from La sonnambula, where Alberto Sousa’s unrefined interjections are less welcome. She can’t melt the heart as she should in the final minutes of Lucia’s ‘Regnavi nel silenzio’, either, while her Norina is hardly big on innocent charm (and the text is missing from the booklet for half of that scene, too).

Gianluca Marcianò conducts idiomatically throughout but he can’t make up for the fact that Gimadieva, clearly a fine artist, is on distinctly uneven form.