With opera banned by papal decree as a dangerous corrupting force, the 18th-century Roman aristocracy consoled itself with solo or duet cantatas, miniature operas by other means. The young Handel delighted his Italian patrons – and simultaneously honed his fluency in the Italianate vocal style – with dozens of such cantatas, most of them still rarities. Andreas Scholl offers three of them, plus a fourth, Mi palpita il cor, composed during Handel’s early years in London. All are in the pastoral-Arcadian vein beloved of the Italian cultural elite, though Arcadia can be a pretty depressing and cynical place. There are even distinct sado-masochistic overtones in the duet cantata Il duello amoroso, with the would-be macho swain mocked (for what we infer to be impotence) by the spiteful shepherdess Amaryllis.

The Italian cantatas were a fertile quarry for the composer’s operas and oratorios. In Vedendo Amor, for instance, an aria depicting Cupid’s stealthy wiles was the model for Caesar’s famous “hunting” aria in Giulio Cesare. With delicate, insinuating inflections, Scholl creates a graphic sense of the net being drawn around the hapless victim. Elsewhere he sings with all his customary liquid beauty of tone (the middle register darkly resonant, the top notes at times ethereally floated, à la Alfred Deller), eloquence of phrase and expressive immediacy.

In Nel dolce tempo he subtly dramatises the one-man dialogues between shepherd and bashful shepherdess. He relives intensely the torments of love in Mi palpita il cor, and in Il duello amoroso vividly catches each shifting phase of his hopeless battle with Hélène Guilmette’s charmingly venomous tease of a shepherdess.

Pleasure in this delectable recital is completed by the zestful, imaginatively coloured playing of Accademia Bizantina, who on their own give a beguiling and inventive performance of the B minor Trio Sonata – yet another fruitful source for this master recycler among composers.