Not usually one to go overboard about Italians, Mozart was delighted with the singing of Francesco Benucci, star of Vienna’s opera buffa troupe. Michael Kelly, the Irish tenor who created the role of Don Basilio in Figaro, recalled Benucci’s ‘stentorian lungs’ when he sang Figaro’s ‘Non più andrai’. Other reports, some quoted in David Vickers’ informative note, cite his beautiful, rounded voice – more bass than baritone – and a comic panache allied to ‘taste’ and elegance. He brought the house down as the first Figaro, then as Leporello in the 1788 Viennese revival of Don Giovanni. At the premiere of Così fan tutte two years later, Benucci became the principal draw in the buffo role of Guglielmo.

It was Benucci’s rare achievement to bring to his comic roles a vocal finesse comparable with the day’s leading prima donnas. Taking up Benucci’s mantle, Matthew Rose – billed as a baritone on the CD cover, but (surely rightly) as a bass in the booklet – likewise has a gift for conveying character without compromising vocal quality. His dark, firmly ‘knit’ tone and evenness across his whole range are heard to fine effect in an ombra aria from Salieri’s La grotta di Trofonio, where the sorcerer of the title balefully summons up the infernal spirits (a whiff here of the Commendatore’s music in Don Giovanni). Like Benucci, Rose is deft and nimble in patter while retaining a true centre to his tone, as in a brace of arias from Soler’s sensationally successful Una cosa rara. His Italian words are always clear and well pointed.

Of the Mozart arias fashioned for Benucci, Guglielmo’s mock-heroic ‘Rivolgete a lui’, which Mozart replaced before the premiere of Così, emerges as rather sober. This absurdly over-the-top paean to the two ‘Albanians’ surely needs more gleeful swagger, with a suggestion of stifled laughter, than Rose musters. Perhaps, too, Leoporello’s Catalogue Aria will strike some as short on lubricious relish, though I’m grateful to hear it sung with such fine tone and disciplined rhythm, and no nudge-nudge emphases (by all accounts Benucci never hammed). Rose’s Figaro, equally well sung, is determined, sardonic, rather than genial. If more of a smile in the tone wouldn’t come amiss in his ringing ‘Non più andrai’, he vividly catches the mingled bitterness and pathos of ‘Aprite un po’ quegli occhi’.

I can’t see why the Figaro items aren’t ordered as they appear in the opera. Similarly, the duets from Così and Don Giovanni, providing welcome cameos for sopranos Katherine Watson and (as a delightful Zerlina) Anna Devin, would be better placed alongside the other numbers from their operas. But these minor irritations hardly diminish pleasure in a splendid tribute to an 18th-century star, sung with the sonorous fullness and ‘taste’ for which Benucci was famed, and accompanied with style, spirit and – not least in Leporello’s aria – a sense of conniving enjoyment by Jonathan Cohen’s superb period band.