Gevorg Hakobyan is a name new to me but, as this album suggests, he is clearly a fine singer: a dramatic baritone (as his own biography in the booklet defines him) with a grand, powerful voice – smooth, open-grained and imposing – and a grand, powerful manner to match it.

The programme starts in forceful style with the sort of Iago who you wouldn’t want to mess with, brutish and unyielding, with little of the wiliness many bring to the role. And he’s effective, in a broad-brush way, in the arias from Andrea Chénier and Il tabarro – one can imagine him making a vivid baddie in the theatre. Indeed, so far as Italian repertoire is concerned, his gifts seem better suited to the earthy needs of verismo than the nobility and finesse called for by Verdi: he makes a good fist of the extracts from Nabucco and Un ballo in maschera but wouldn’t automatically be a first choice in that repertoire.

He certainly feels at home, though, in the Russian repertoire and the three operas from his home country, Armenia. There’s a heartfelt passion to his Aleko, and the Prince Igor aria builds up a real dramatic momentum. The Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky arias are no less involving, with the latter showing Hakobyan’s gift for vivid storytelling. And there’s no resisting the big-hearted pride that he brings to the Armenian numbers – even if they are perhaps not so memorable, musically speaking.

As often with recordings from this source, one has to put up with some less than top-notch playing from the Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra, sometimes scrappy and thin but sometimes also – as in the postlude to Aleko’s Cavatina – simply short on passion. (Conducting duties are split between John Fisher and Constantine Orbelian, but we’re not told anything more specific than that.) Delos’s engineering is rather hazy, too. Despite that, though, there’s much to enjoy in this impressive showcase of a powerful, persuasive singer.