Ignore the feel-good title and the fluffy booklet-note, and what you have here is actually a serious recital from an artist at the start of what is, let’s hope, a significant career. Which is not to underplay the young South African soprano’s story. Growing up in the small town of Piet Retief, she got hooked on opera when she heard Delibes’s Flower Duet as a teenager. Just 10 years later she was appearing on many of the world’s great stages.

It’s that journey that this disc charts, documenting the arias and roles – some at the slightly rarer end of the bel canto spectrum – that have marked her progress. The inclusion of the Flower Duet, though biographically justified, of course, feels like the only concession to populism.

It all starts off a little slowly with an ‘Una voce poco fa’ that takes a little while to hit its stride, but it soon becomes clear, as Yende leaves her slightly underpowered middle register to unveil a brilliant top, that hers is a lyric coloratura voice of real beauty and flexibility. There’s a dash of cream to it, and she phrases with instinctive musicality and feel for line, meaning that her Bellini and Donizetti, in particular, have a real seductiveness to them. Her Comte Ory Countess is a high-quality affair, too.

But Yende isn’t quite the finished product – and recital discs rarely show singers at their best. She doesn’t manage, for example, to go beyond intelligent phrasing into the sort of acting with the voice that the best singers in this repertoire offer (most of them, admittedly, now in the past). Nor does she introduce much tonal variety to distinguish between her characters. Her French isn’t consistent, and her impressively fluent coloratura loses its sureness as she ascends.

She doesn’t get the best support, either: Marco Armiliato could have fired up his players a little more (and tidied up some unsure wind playing); Kate Aldrich is undistinguished in her appearances, while Gianluca Buratto and Nicola Alaimo offer rather rustic interjections in the Puritani mad scene. Yende herself is clearly a major talent, though, and one who is only going to get better. This particular journey’s only the beginning.