‘GF Händel’ proclaims the CD cover, appending ‘Leonardo Vinci’ in smaller type below. Shrewd marketing, perhaps, but a touch disingenuous. In fact there’s barely a note of Handel on offer. What we get is the Italian composer’s setting of Metastasio’s Didone abbandonata as performed by Handel in his hectic 1737 Covent Garden season. In Rome in 1726 Vinci had fielded an all-male cast. Handel, who evidently admired the Italian (and was happy to filch the odd idea from him), naturally adapted the opera to his London ensemble. Prima donna Anna Strada del Pò took the part of Dido, while the role of the Moorish King Iarbas had to be beefed up for the star castrato Domenico Annibali. Using a score lent to him by his friend and future librettist Charles Jennens, Handel set to work cutting, tweaking and transposing, and interpolating nine arias by Hasse, Vivaldi, the obscure Geminiano Giacomelli and Vinci himself. After just four performances the resultant pasticcio disappeared from view. ‘Very heavy’ was the verdict of Handel’s supporter Lord Shaftesbury.

‘Too little variety’ was my own final impression of Didone, though there are musical beauties en route. Vinci was the pioneer of the new Neapolitan style that staked all on simplicity, clarity and surface elegance. Counterpoint is virtually non-existent. Much of Vinci’s – and not only Vinci’s – invention, however agreeable, seems too mellifluously bland for the dramatic situation, as one ambling or jaunty major-key aria follows another. The minor is an endangered mode. Yet at moments music and drama do mesh effectively: in Dido’s aptly regal ‘Son regina’ (which brought the house down in the original Rome production) and her plangent ‘Se vuoi ch’io mora’, the one number extensively reworked by Handel; or in Aeneas’s swaggering ‘A trionfar’, imported from a Hasse opera. Finest of all is the opera’s closing scene, a series of fragmentary accompanied recitatives for Dido broken by a splenetic outburst from the villainous Iarbas.

Based on a staged production in Schwetzingen, this new studio recording should satisfy anyone who fancies investigating an offbeat slice of 18th-century operatic history. The young cast all have the requisite fluent coloratura technique and dramatise as vividly as their music allows. The silvery-toned Robin Johannsen, as a Dido by turns touching and commanding, contrasts just sufficiently with Olivia Vermeulen’s warmer mezzo as Aeneas. Vermeulen’s confident negotiation of Hasse’s vertiginous leaps and plunges makes ‘A trionfar’ a highlight of the whole performance. The other singers are all well cast, though Antonio Giovanni’s Iarbas can sound merely petulant when he should be a force to reckon with – a familiar problem with countertenors in extremis. All the while Wolfgang Katschner directs his Berlin-based Lautten Compagney with spirit and affection, ever sensitive to his singers. Documentation, too, is first-rate, with libretto in Italian, English and German, and several informative, properly translated essays. Just don’t expect any Handel here.