I love a good concept album and this one is simultaneously thoughtful, fun and prescient. Swedish mezzo-soprano Malena Ernman (Greta Thunberg’s mum) joins Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata in their 25th-anniversary year to create a programme of Baroque-and-beyond songs and ballads intertwined with lively sonatas and ending with ‘Nature Boy’, once made famous by Nat King Cole. Along the way there’s much upbeat music-making and extemporisation, a cornucopia of instrumental wonder with a serious message. It’s a delicate balance and they very nearly manage it. Very nearly.

While there’s little, if anything, not to like about any of the performers, this for me is an album wrought by a stylistic rift between singer and band. Both good, but both very different sorts of musicians. The opening selection from Biber’s Sonata representativa, ‘Nachtigal’, has a fleeting similarity to the whistle that opens West Side Story and quickly erupts into a blast of chirruping fanfares, exactly the lightly worn and uplifting energy one has come to expect from Pluhar. Yet when we first hear Ernman in John Bennet’s ‘Venus’ birds’, which I feel should mimic the soaring of a bird on an air current, it doesn’t sound free enough for my taste. It’s well sung, but it’s too serious a kind of singing, and unexpected vowels distract from the text. This continues with Thomas Arne’s ‘When daisies pied’ (‘The Cuckow’) until it’s obvious that this programme simply doesn’t suit Ernman. That she’s a good mezzo-soprano there is no doubt, but where bigger Handel arias – ‘Ombra mai fù’ or ‘Scherza infida’, for example – would probably suit her, the fiddly, text-centric songs in this programme need, in my opinion, a lighter voice, a higher tessitura and certainly a singer with a more speech-like quality. Listening to a rich-toned mezzo singing the nonsense lyrics ‘Whipsee diddledee dandy dee’ is dangerously close to the earnest schools-radio broadcasts of yesteryear. So while the separate halves of this album – L’Arpeggiata and Ernman – are both of high quality, the combination just doesn’t gel for me.

When Handel does appear in a jazzy arrangement of ‘’Twas when the seas were roaring’, it’s notable that Ernman is much closer to her comfort zone, but Orlandini’s sumptuous aria about a dying swan, which should also be a showstopper, really isn’t. More miss than hit, sadly.