Paris’s beautiful Opéra-Comique is just a 10-minute stroll from the equally opulent Palais Garnier via the Boulevard des Italiens and it’s the name of this street that tenor Benjamin Bernheim has adopted for the title of his album of ‘French’ arias by Italian composers. It’s a neat title, even if five of the operas represented premiered at the Garnier’s predecessor, the Salle Le Peletier, which is just a little north of the Comique in the opposite direction.

Surprisingly, it is Puccini who tops and tails the programme, with arias from Madama Butterfly and Tosca in translations by Paul Ferrier which were performed in Paris in the first decade of the 20th century. The rest of the disc contains music that its composers either wrote specifically to French librettos or adaptations of existing operas to suit the tastes of the Paris Opéra, or ‘la grande boutique’, as Verdi referred to it. Verdi had a complicated relationship with Paris. Here, we get arias from Jérusalem, his not entirely convincing reworking of I Lombardi, and two operas specifically composed for the French capital, Les vêpres siciliennes and Don Carlos. Spontini and Cherubini are represented by arias from La Vestale and Ali Baba respectively, and Donizetti – who spent many production years in Paris – by La fille du régiment, La favorite and his final completed opera, Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal.

There’s something of the young Roberto Alagna about Bernheim’s tenor, a bright, open sound, unforced and with a sunny smile in his voice. One can certainly imagine him doing justice to the title-role in Don Carlos, especially as the opera is now given in the original French. Bernheim floats lovely head notes in a rapt account of the aria ‘Je l’ai vue’ and is joined by guest baritone Florian Sempey in the famous Friendship Duet. Henri’s Act 4 aria from Vêpres is interesting as Bernheim chooses ‘Ô toi que j’ai chérie’, which Verdi composed in 1863 for tenor Pierre-François Villaret to replace ‘Ô jour de peine’. Both Pavarotti and Domingo recorded it, but Bernheim’s native French leads to a more polished result.

The Spontini aria is a real cracker and Bernheim’s delivery of ‘Ange si pur que dans un songe’ from La favorite is charming. There are a couple of super soft high notes: in the final phrase of Gaston’s ‘Je veux encor entendre ta voix’ (more famously known as ‘La mia letizia infondere’ in the original I Lombardi); and Dom Sébastien’s ‘Seul sur la terre’, composed for the great French tenor Gilbert Duprez, which requires voix mixte for the high D flat and which Bernheim brings off beautifully. His full-chest high Cs can sound a little metallic, but that would be my only complaint.

Frédéric Chaslin and the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna offer atmospheric support, the prominent harp and horn solos in Dom Sébastien demonstrating just how well Donizetti had adopted French orchestral colours in his writing, plus an eloquent clarinet solo to open the Fontainebleau scene from Don Carlos.