Circumstances of various kinds dictated that the vast majority of Mozart’s independent arias would be composed for the soprano voice, but there are a handful for tenor and for bass, and just one for alto.All the tenor ones are included here, apartfrom one small fragment, another much larger one of which Mozart left the orchestration unfinished (a completed version does in fact exist) and the slightly longer and little known original of Se al labbro mi non credi.

There is not much in the very early pieces to challenge Christoph Prégardien, interpretatively speaking: he negotiates the bravura of Va, dal furor portata coolly and comfortably and delivers the recitative ‘Or che il dover’ with nice timing. There is pleasantly smooth singing in the charming Si mostra la sorte and in Con ossequio, a comic aria demanding, and duly receiving, very lively articulation. But neither here nor in the still more rapid Clarice cara mia sposa does he quite show the Italian knack of making the words become virtually part of the music.

Se al labbro is an aria of very great beauty, written for the elderly tenor Anton Raaff and using the legato style in which, as a product of the Bolognese Bernacchi school of singing, hespecialised. Prégardien can mould a long line tellingly, but wants a certain warmth, softness and flexibility in his very clean and direct singing. Something of the same may be said of the two later items, but there is considerable subtlety is his shaping of the lines in the slow music of Per pietà, non ricercate and his musicianly singing of the Andante section of Misero! o sogno is equally persuasive.

All this music would be more effective with better accompaniment. The later items are marred by an obtrusive (and sometimes ill-timed) piano continuo accompaniment. But worse are the exaggerated and explosive accents favoured by conductor Michi Gaigg. I can scarcely bring myself to write about the instrumental items. There seems to me little point in using period instruments and then handling them with a coarseness and violence alien to the 18th century. Listen to the third movement of the K138 Divertimento for some quite extraordinarily rough playing (not to mention the added pizzicato and ponticello effects), or to the ludicrous molto crescendo in bar 2 of the symphony – not asked for by Mozart, nor in his style, and absurdly repeated on every recurrence. Or try the Andante of K138 for stilted playing and harsh, unpleasant sound. Better still, don’t.