The young Italian baritone Paolo Bordogna rattles and prattles his way through this programme of comic arias with an easy fluency (the patter in the Rossini numbers is especially impressive). He sings cleanly and sometimes impressively; the top of the voice, for example, can show a ringing, incisive quality. It can also, however, show a tendency towards slight unsteadiness (listen to the first top notes in Doctor Bartolo’s ‘A un dottor della mia sorte’), which grows out of the voice’s essentially rather dry quality. On several occasions I longed for a bit more juice and roundness in the timbre, which would have allowed more variety of colour: great buffo singing involves more than just the words and notes; it is also built on an ability to use the different colours in a voice for additional comic effect.

This is not something that, as yet, seems to form part of Bordogna’s armoury, and one need only listen to more lavishly endowed, lower-lying singers as Leporello (Walter Berry or, more recently, Bryn Terfel, to name but two) or Don Magnifico (Ruggero Raimondi, to name but one) to hear what can be done, respectively, with the Catalogue Aria or ‘Sia qualunque delle figlie’. Falstaff, too, is a stretch for Bordogna, less in terms of notes than force of vocal character, while the singer’s lack of variety backfires rather in the Don Pasquale extract, where he sings both Dottor Malatesta and Don Pasquale.

It’s nice to have some rarer repertoire here, however, in the form of the Mascagni and Rota arias, and the extract from Donizetti’s Le convenienze e le inconvenienze teatrali, whose Mamma Agata offers Bordogna more exotic dressing-up opportunities for the photos that litter the booklet at the expense of translations of the arias (we get texts in Italian only, plus a couple of essays, which are translated). Francesco Lanzillotta and the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini offer efficient support.