There are three stories being told here. The first is that, contrary to what people may think, the tenor was a welcome presence in Baroque opera. The second is in the title, the torments of love being expressed in a selection of arias in which the singer suffers at the hands of desired ones variously absent, cruel-hearted, calculating, cussed or just plain uninterested. And the third, intricately outlined in Dinko Fabris’s booklet note, is the shift of operatic power and influence from Venice (represented here by two of its 17th-century giants in Cavalli and Cesti) to Naples (Provenzale and, moving into the 18th century, Vinci and Fago). Caresana worked in both cities, and Venetian Vivaldi gets in for having a go at the Neapolitan manner.

This is enough to make it different from many Baroque aria selections, as most of the 17th-century arias are short and straightforwardly expressive, unencumbered by vocal excess. And of course it is predominantly doleful, rising occasionally to a bit of (somewhat contained) anger or revenge (as in the middle section of Cesti’s ‘Berenice, ove sei?’), or glimpses of hope in a light dance song such as Caresana’s ‘Tien ferma Fortuna’. It is thus hard for some of these arias to make a mark, but I was struck by the slow-moving, Corellian harmonies that underly the singer’s drawn-out complaints in the Cesti, and the drooping, broken lines of Provenzale’s forlorn ‘Che speri, o mio core’. Vinci and Fago liven things up with more expansive vocal lines and active orchestral parts. Vinci’s ‘Gelido in ogni vena’ is classically Neapolitan in its bearing, though strangely at odds with a text that speaks of blood running cold in the veins, an image Vivaldi nails by opening his protracted setting of the same words with the jabbing, icy dissonances that begin his ‘Winter’ concerto.

Ian Bostridge applies his lieder-singer intelligence to these operatic snapshots, for which his familiar expressive wail has an effective place. In general, however, his voice does not have the cut-through and presence that it had on his previous baroque album, ‘Three Baroque Tenors’ (EMI/Warner, 12/10). True, this is more intimate music than Handel or Arne, and the recording itself seems a little distant as well, but there are moments of vocal fragility and curious colour-shifts here that worry the listener – perhaps he is just not on best form. Mind you, Antonio Florio’s Cappella Neapolitana, soft and silky as they are in the opening Sartorio Sinfonia, also lack energy, rarely firming or brightening their tone from base-line lugubrious.

The album ends with a lilting Neapolitan folk-song ‘encore’ and very nicely done it is, too, with Bostridge (pictured in the booklet wandering around Naples in his Panama hat) sounding very much at home.