So far young male soprano Nicolò Balducci has stuck to safe territory for his solo albums: music written for castratos. But with his third he takes a giant leap across both centuries and genres, landing in the much more contentious terrain of late 18th- and early 19th-century salon music. It’s a bold statement, but one perhaps more novel than strictly satisfying.

Rhetoric has always been at the fore with Balducci, sometimes to the detriment of vocal lines smudged with intrusive swoops and expressive pitch-bending. But it’s an approach legitimised in a programme note by Balducci’s collaborator, keyboardist Anna Paradiso. Paradiso explores the unusual context of salon performances, particularly for women with little other expressive outlet, reframing these bite-size melodramas as coded outpourings. It’s a curious angle to emphasise while also celebrating Balducci as the first male soprano to tackle much of this repertoire.

Songs by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven range from the slight and charming (Beethoven’s ‘La partenza’ and ‘Plaisir d’aimer’, Mozart’s ‘Dans un bois solitaire’) to the quasi-operatic (Beethoven’s ‘In questa tomba oscura’, Haydn’s ‘The Spirit’s Song’), shading aided by Paradiso’s deft performances and her own two fortepianos: a tenorial 1802 Broadwood and a ‘little square piano’ by Swedish maker Mathias Petter Kraft (1797). The latter comes with a distinctive lute stop, used to striking effect for the rolling arpeggios of Mozart’s ‘Abendempfindung an Laura’.

But the combination of both instruments – each on the lighter side – and Balducci’s own dazzling-bright tone is relentless, expressively one-note, lacking depth, despite his audible efforts. There’s an absence of lower resonance, of anchoring bass – something we also feel in a programme of posh lollipops. There’s not a lot to get your teeth into here, and once you’ve got your ear around the novelty of a male soprano singing ‘Adelaide’ it’s hard to avoid the urge to seek out Goerne or Fischer-Dieskau. Is there any repertoire here I’d rather hear Balducci sing than a female soprano? Regretfully, no.