‘Her person was coarse and masculine.’ ‘She was short and squat, with a doughy cross face.’ ‘She had so little of Venus in her appearance, that she was usually called the Pig.’ So much for 18th-century gallantry. Yet what Handel’s prima donnas Margherita Durastante, Francesca Cuzzoni and Anna Maria Strada del Pò evidently lacked in physical charms they more than made up for in vocal magnetism. Celebrating what she dubs ‘the duality of the female soul’, Hungarian soprano Emőke Baráth pays tribute to the prowess of these Handelian A listers, plus a smattering of lesser lights, in both male and female roles. In an age of operatic cross-dressing the versatile Durastante often sang travesti parts, including Radamisto and the macho general Tauride in Arianna. Cuzzoni – the first Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare – was renowned for her sweetness and ‘tender and touching expression’, while Strada, whose roles included Partenope and Alcina, combined agility and dramatic power.

Baráth tests her own versatility in a selection of arias, familiar and unfamiliar, from nine Handel operas. In an otherwise muscular performance of Tauride’s horn-fuelled ‘Qual leon’ her lowest notes lack bite. This minor cavil aside, I enjoyed her singing virtually without reservation. She movingly exploits the dark glint within her silvery soprano in Radamisto’s grieving ‘Ombra cara’, moulding Handel’s expansive lines with restrained eloquence against chromatically coiling strings. Partnered with stylistic understanding by Philippe Jaroussky’s Artaserse, Baráth, as ever, thinks in paragraphs rather than phrases.

Thinking ‘long’ also pays rich dividends in Cleopatra’s anguished prayer ‘Se pietà’, where Baráth shapes the sorrowing melismas with exquisite grace. She and Jaroussky perfectly time the many interrupted cadences that contribute crucially to the aria’s emotional force. Here and elsewhere Baráth can turn the da capo almost into a free improvisation: excessive for some, I suspect, though for me Baráth uses this freedom to heighten the music’s expressive intensity.

In lighter mode she portrays the flirtatious Partenope to the manner born in a seductively teasing ‘butterfly’ aria, and is delightfully blithe in an aria from Faramondo written for another cross-dressing specialist, Margherita Chimenti (ambiguously praised by Handel’s friend Mary Pendarves as ‘a tolerable good woman with a pretty voice’). Baráth is in her element, too, in solos that trade on coloratura brilliance, whether in the joyous explosion of Cleopatra’s ‘Da tempeste’, or the mingled elegance and fire of the aria from Lotario that rounds off the recital in spectacular style. Singing and playing are complemented by an absorbing note from Suzanne Aspden that sets the arias in context and brings each of Handel’s star sopranos vividly to life. These days all-Handel recitals are ten-a-penny. Very few, though, are as compelling, musically and dramatically, as this.