Opera Rara continues its ambitious eight-disc project unearthing gems from Gaetano Donizetti’s versatile 200 solo song repertoire with a new double release featuring Albanian lyric soprano Ermonela Jaho and the London-based label’s Artistic Director Carlo Rizzi on piano.

The first of the pair, Volume 5, features Italian songs which Donizetti wrote before moving to Paris in 1838. It starts off with an absolute beauty – an eight-minute lullaby La ninna-nonna, the perfect vehicle to show off Jaho’s emotional range – and includes songs that Opera Rara’s Repertoire Consultant Roger Parker discovered in a monastery in Linz, Austria, as part of a manuscript collection containing 15 previously unknown Donizetti canzonettas. Other songs, notably the two versions of Che non mi disse un dì (What did he not once say to me!) appear in some of the 70 or so operas he wrote from 1816 to 1845. 

The most substantial song in the Italian volume Il pescatora, a “Lorelei”-style setting of a poem by Achilles de Lauzières, adds weight to Parker’s claim in...