Ekaterina Siurina first came to prominence more than two decades ago as a coloratura soprano, much admired for her Gilda, Adina and Olympia, though she also soon established herself as a Mozartian, most notably, perhaps, as Zerlina (a lovely performance on DVD in Claus Guth’s controversial 2009 Salzburg staging – EuroArts, 1/11) and Pamina, which she memorably sang at Covent Garden in 2013. Her new recital, ‘Where is my beloved?’, however, reflects her more recent gravitation towards lyric-dramatic repertory with a programme of arias about absent lovers or lost love, the latter on occasion maternal rather than amorous.

Siurina’s voice has, of course, grown in amplitude of late, and a hint of metal now lurks beneath its silky sound. Her ability to float soft high pianissimos remains immaculate: the final ‘Parlami, amore!’ in ‘Senza Mamma’ is ravishing, as is the passage towards the close of Tatyana’s Letter Scene where Tchaikovsky’s heroine loses herself in rapt contemplation of whether Onegin is angel or tempter. But this is also a voice that can now soar comfortably over a large orchestra to thrilling effect at the end of Butterfly’s ‘Un bel dì’, or at ‘Guarda ben! Amore addio!’ in the same opera’s final scene.

Her diction is admirably clear but you notice that it is the ebb and flow of line and dynamics that carry the primary interpretative weight. The arching phrases of ‘Io son l’umile ancella’ from Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, taken slower than usual, are particularly telling in the slightly self-conscious way they suggest the mixture of sincerity, rapture and self-regard that characterise Adriana’s view of her own artistry. The surges of emotion that Iolanta can barely voice or identify, meanwhile, are conveyed by the most straightforward means, and there are no overt histrionics in the aria from Boito’s Mefistofele, where the oscillation between declamation and melisma, all superbly shaped, tell us everything we need to know about the abstraction and horror that fill Margherita’s mind.

Constantine Orbelian and his Lithuanian orchestra are persuasive accompanists: the strings sound admirably sensuous in Rusalka’s Song to the Moon and in Verdi’s depiction of sunlight on sea that prefaces Amelia’s aria from Simon Boccanegra. The latter is played complete, which throws into awkward relief some odd cuts of orchestral passages elsewhere. The Mefistofele aria is missing part of its introduction. More detrimentally, the closing scene of Butterfly comes minus both the ‘Con onor muore’ section at the start and the peroration after ‘Va’, gioca, gioca’, leaving the emotional trajectory precariously and unsatisfactorily incomplete. There’s plenty of space on what is ultimately a short disc (53 minutes) to give both scenes in their entirety, or indeed a couple more arias, for that matter. What we do have, though, is lovely, and well worth hearing.