Belying the stereotyped image of Russian sopranos, the 23-year-old Julia Lezhneva fields a voice of bell-like purity, even throughout its compass, immaculately fluent in coloratura. Her first solo disc, of Rossini arias (7/11), revealed her vocal flair, if not yet any special gift for characterisation. While she is still inclined to be consonant-shy, Lezhneva’s particular gifts are ideally attuned to the repertoire on this new disc. These sacred vocal concertos are high-class show-off music, designed to dazzle and astonish. Encouraged by the dangerously combustible strings of Il Giardino Armonico, Lezhneva brings fearless attack and devil-may-care virtuosity to the opening of Vivaldi’s In furore iustissimae irae, where, as she puts it in a booklet interview, ‘the voice imitates a mad violin’. In the swaggering aria that launches Handel’s Saeviat tellus (more familiar from its reincarnation in Apollo e Dafne) she relishes her role as a surrogate trumpet hurling proud defiance at the forces of Hades. She is dulcet in the ravishing central nocturne – which Handel recycled in Agrippina – and in the final ‘Alleluia’ vindicates a delirious tempo with the pearling grace of her coloratura.

The rarity here is the amiably galant motet by Nicola Porpora, one-time rival of Handel in London, mentor of the young Haydn in Vienna. ‘Porpora’s music fits my voice like Chopin fits a pianist’s hands,’ proclaims Lezhneva in the booklet. True to her word, she trills and pirouettes her way with coltish eagerness through Porpora’s elegant fripperies. After so much balletic delicacy, she then finds a fuller, richer tone – and a real sense of jubilation – for the outer movements of Mozart’s Exsultate, jubilate. In the slow central aria she distils a touching innocence with the instrumental purity of her soft singing, complete with flutey high notes. Though Il Giardino Armonico’s punchy, adrenalin-fuelled playing may disconcert some in Mozart, they vividly complement a singer who rivals the young Bartoli in high-octane virtuosity.