Soprano recital albums are nothing new under the sun, but this one is focused less on the singer and more on the programme. Ermonela Jaho made her Opera Rara debut in 2015 with its rediscovery recording of Leoncavallo’s Zazà. The soprano who created the title-role was Rosina Storchio and this disc is devoted to roles she sang, and particularly roles she created, including Cio-Cio-San in the 1904 premiere of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.

That La Scala premiere was a fiasco. Storchio was known to be having an affair with Arturo Toscanini and when a draught on stage caused her kimono to suddenly billow out, there were ribald cries of ‘Toscanini’s baby!’ from members of the audience who had heard the rumours (true) that she had had an illegitimate baby with the conductor the year before. However, critics agreed that, despite the opera being a flop, causing Puccini to withdraw it to make revisions, Storchio’s performance was a triumph.

Storchio’s was not a conventionally beautiful voice. Ditlev Rindom’s booklet essay describes it as ‘small scale’ but writes that her ‘pathos and charm’ helped her score successes in fragile verismo roles. Fossick around on YouTube and you’ll unearth a 1904 recording of Storchio singing ‘Nel suo amore rianimata’ from Giordano’s Russian chiller Siberia. (Opera Rara’s splendid 54-page booklet features a postcard of Storchio and Giuseppe De Luca in the premiere.) Yes, there’s fragility there, but there’s a purity too that is not always evident in later recordings.

So in many ways, it is appropriate that the soprano taking on the Storchio mantle here is Jaho. Like Storchio, the Albanian doesn’t have the most beautiful soprano instrument. She has a slender tone, definitely more lyric than spinto, and is often so deeply invested in her role that it’s not always a very ‘pretty’ sound. Yet it’s exactly these qualities that are her strengths here. This is not yet another recital disc where the singer learns the music, sings the notes, gets the thumbs up from the recording engineer and lines up the next aria. Jaho invests each and every role with a sense of drama that translates across the speakers, even though there are no visuals.

The album is topped and tailed by Jaho’s Butterfly. Immediately in ‘Un bel dì’ one gets a sense of Cio-Cio-San’s unwavering belief that Pinkerton will return, while her farewell to her son before taking her own life is nearly as heartbreaking on disc as it is in the opera house, Andrea Battistoni and the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana lending sympathetic support as they do throughout.

Storchio also created the role of Mimì, not in Puccini’s La bohème but in Leoncavallo’s, and Jaho sings both Mimì’s description of Musette as well as Musetta’s capricious return favour, ‘Mimì Pinson, la biondinetta’ (which Storchio also recorded). The centrepiece of the disc is the death scene from Pietro Mascagni’s Lodoletta, a 12-minute scena as she collapses in the snow, heading to her former lover’s house to beg forgiveness, expiring as the bells chime midnight. If this tour de force doesn’t persuade Opera Rara to record the entire opera, there’s absolutely no justice in the operatic world.

Other less-performed works are included, such as Mascagni’s Iris (a precursor of Butterfly in many ways and familiar to audiences at Opera Holland Park) and two arias from Massenet’s Sapho including the moving Act 5 scene where Fanny imagines returning to care for her illegitimate son. There are familiar roles too: Jaho is a moving Margherita in Boito’s Mefistofele, a touching Manon (‘Adieu, notre petite table’) and her trademark Violetta – also a key Storchio role – is represented by an aching ‘Addio, del passato’ that is so haunted by desperation as to draw tears.

‘The key to my heart – my emotional truth – is the key to unlocking the heart of the audience’, writes Jaho in the booklet introduction. She certainly achieves that aim here in an emotionally gripping album that should not be missed.