All credit to the festival in Besigheim in Germany for unearthing in 2009 a totally unknown opera by Handel and assembling a team of young singers that it would be hard to match for freshness and firmness, even among singers with starrier names. Oreste, with a libretto by Giovanni Gualberto Barlocci, is a pasticcio opera that Handel assembled in December 1734, drawing some two dozen arias from various works of his own. It received only three performances in 1734, a failure which may be accounted for by the foundation of a rival opera company and by the fact that Gay’s Beggar’s Opera was making the fickle London public fall out of love with serious Italian opera anyway.

The wonder is how many delights the work contains, though the Animato note-writer does not attempt to identify the sources from which the various arias are drawn. The recitatives which serve to tell the plot – based on the Greek myth of Iphigenia in Tauris – were neatly tailored by Handel himself and have been arranged here so that the three acts are fitted on two very well-filled discs. Each act ends with brief ballet numbers, delightfully played here not least by the ensemble’s fat-toned oboist. There is also one duet for Oreste and Ermione near the end of Act 2 and several choruses designed for the soloists to sing as an ensemble.

Conductor Tobias Horn is no doubt responsible for the freshness of the playing, which fully matches the clarity and fine focus of all the singing. Mezzo Cornelia Lanz is outstanding in the title-role, with sopranos Nastasja Docalu as Ermione and Sabine Winter as Ifigenia. The countertenor of Armin Stein as Filotete provides a nice contrast with the female singers. There is little attempt at characterisation but the purely musical values are what matter most and those could hardlybe more impressive. The recording, made in Besigheim church, is ideally atmospheric and not at all over-reverberant.