Vocal recitals with piano accompaniment can be frosty affairs but not when Cecilia Bartoli is performing. She loves what she sings, she loves her audience and, with all due modesty, she loves her own voice.

Who wouldn’t? It’s 20 years since her first recording signalled her remarkable talent. Then she sang Rossini and she returned to him for this affectionate re-creation of his salon evenings in the twilight of his career.

The music that he wrote for them works on a smaller scale than his operas; the vocal demands are less exorbitant, the emotions more subdued, more intimate. The same applies to the Bellini and Donizetti songs Bartoli included.

With her habitual attention to detail, she invested every word with meaning, every note with colour. Her pianissimos are exquisite and if her trill is less heavenly than it once was, it remains a delight. Wonder to behold, it even became a yodel for Rossini’s The Tyrolean Orphan.

She is a natural comedian, but her will to make us laugh sometimes drained away the humour, while in sad songs, she seemed unwilling to find a register other than full-on tragic. This material could survive a lighter touch.

Still, she is a treasure. With Sergio Ciomei’s ideal accompaniment, only a churl would complain for long. Her encores included Ernesto de Curtis’s defiantly sentimental Non ti scordar di me: “Don’t forget me”. We shan’t.