Danielle de Niese has made her name singing Monteverdi, Rameau and Handel so perhaps it’s unsurprising that the earliest works here come off best. “Suits for singers”, I once heard Sir Roger Norrington call the early Mozart operas, and she fits the opera seria conventions of “Oh, temerario Arbace!” round her like a brocaded frock-coat, bending the rocking melody to her will under the indulgent beat and watchful eye of Sir Charles Mackerras – though Véronique Gens (Virgin, 10/98), more poised and swifter, is no less heartfelt in bidding farewell to the “paternal embrace” of the aria. Still more genuinely impassioned and impressive is Ilia’s first scena: a role that is evidently coming to maturity.

Richard Lawrence remarked (in reviewing her Handel disc, 2/09) on the shrill sound of her voice as recorded. That and its breathy appeal to the ear even when not pleading, further spotlit by some exaggerated emphasis on dying syllables, especially in recitative, are noticeable in another concerted test-piece for operatic valedictions, “Bella, mia fiamma”. Christiane Oelze (Berlin Classics) is harder of tone but more pert of character and yielding of sympathy, she and the accompaniment more of one mind. In character, de Niese seems to have at least one eye turned towards her audience, invisible or otherwise, rather than the imagined object of her scorn or affection. She is somewhat set back from the microphone on the sacred tracks which bookend the album, and not to her advantage (the booklet lists two separate sessions, though not what was recorded when).

Even where her fioritura is most secure and not too winsomely projected, in Susanna’s “alternative” aria or the happier number from Il re pastore (written at the age of 19, seven years after “Oh, temerario Arbace”), the unnamed obbligato soloists contrive to steal her thunder with playing of exquisite point and subtlety.