My hackles rose before I had played even a note of this disc. We are presented with, in what passes for a booklet, no fewer than nine portraits of the singer, which might have been replaced with texts, important when you can hardly hear the words in the items other than the English one, not to forget the pretentious title. Place the CD in the player and you hear a small, pretty, vibrato-less voice as though the singer were aping a treble. Musical she certainly is, but she scarcely has the wherewithal to tackle such an ambitious programme as she has chosen.

There’s little sense of drama in her singing, only a well groomed monotony. Then she has no business wandering into arias that belong to quite other kind of voices – Xerxes, Rinaldo and Jupiter, for instance – so there is no sense of situation, only a sameness that seems to have the OAE bored out of its collective mind.

What can be rescued from this ill-advised venture? A finely ethereal account of the aria from Bach’s St Matthew Passion, plangent readings of the Dowland songs and a bright and breezy “Let the bright Seraphim”. While Dido’s Lament is gently, inwardly done, Thomas misses the depth of tone needed in this piece. The closing duet from Poppea, with Robin Blaze as Nero, sounds far too chaste. The final impression of the whole offering is of an aspiring singer way out of her depth. I guess Emma Kirkby is her model, but the elder artist has never let herself sound anonymous. The rather recessed recording doesn’t help.