Not all baroque aria recitals are created equal. A minority intertwine curiosity, imagination and insight. This collaboration between Roberta Mameli, the Lyonnais band Le Concert de l’Hostel Dieu, its harpsichordist-director Franck-Emmanuel Comte and Sicilian musicologist Paolo V Montanari is an engrossing survey of arias from early 18th-century operatic treatments of the story of Hamlet. Co-librettists Apostolo Zeno and Pietro Pariati did not emulate Shakespeare’s play but were inspired by the same source that the Bard had used – the early 12th-century history Gesta Danorum. The madness of Ambleto is blatantly feigned, and everyone knows that his uncle/stepfather Fengone is guilty of murdering the prince’s father King Horwendillus – including the queen Gerilda (who loathes her new husband and cannot bear his wickedness). To make matters more complicated, the usurper lusts after Ambleto’s fiancée Veremonda (a Swedish prisoner of war). In the end, Ambleto avenges his father’s murder by killing Fengone and he becomes the rightful new king of Denmark.

The libretto was first set by Francesco Gasparini for Venice’s San Cassiano (1705). A pasticcio adaptation at London’s Queen’s Theatre (1712) retained about half of Gasparini’s arias and incorporated 20 pieces by other composers, including several numbers reappropriated from Pollarolo’s Venceslao (Venice, 1703) and music by Albinoni, Caldara and Handel – an aria lifted from Agrippina (Venice, 1709). Zeno and Pariati’s text was set afresh by Domenico Scarlatti for Rome’s Teatro Capranica (1715). Their libretto was rewritten considerably for Giuseppe Carcani’s setting for Venice’s Teatro Sant’Angelo (1741). Excerpts from fragmentary sources of these four operas are sequenced into a satisfying journey through musical moods and shifting emotional situations. Mameli declaims the text and shapes lines intelligently, her judicious embellishments are consistently delightful, and Le Concert de l’Hostel’s versatile playing is by turns tenderly intimate (Ambleto’s petition to the heavens in Gasparini’s continuo aria ‘Stelle, voi che de’ regnanti’) or brightly assertive (Gasparini’s ‘Tromba in campo e spada in guerra’, dispatched charismatically by Mameli and trumpeter Andrien Mabire). Along the way, there is a suitably sneering rendition of the tautly sprung ‘Tu indegno sei dell’allor’ (Handel’s two-faced Agrippina adjusted into Gerilda’s disdain at the tyrant Fengone), plaintive soulfulness in Scarlatti’s treatment of Veremonda’s lament ‘Nella mia sfortunata prigionia’ (underpinned by harmonic twists from the strings), and gleefulness (Pollarolo’s short ‘D’ire armato il braccio forte’, in which Ambleto celebrates administering poison to Fengone).

As for the hero’s feigned delirium, honeyed melodiousness in Carcani’s ‘Segui ad amar costante’ is less persuasive than Gasparini’s hushed ‘mad’ tale of a bee collecting nectar from flowers until it is attacked treacherously by a venomous snake (‘Cinto d’amiche rose un dì crescea’). Mameli and Le Concert de l’Hostel Dieu display a harmonious kinship of intriguing repertoire and felicitous musical expressivity.