The overture is what you’ve come to expect from Arcangelo under Jonathan Cohen: at once grand and intimate, already hinting, in its nuanced realisation of Handel’s score, the joys and sorrows to come in what was one of the composer’s finest yet least successful oratorios.

Yet the following air and chorus, “Go, My Faithful Soldier and Draw a Blessing Down” defies expectations in the sheer fluency and splendour of the singing, quickly establishing not just Cohen’s modus operandi here but another hallmark of this brilliant new recording: the way in which each singer so fully inhabits their character in relation to the entire tragedy.

Handel completed Theodora (HWV68) in 1749, regular collaborator Thomas Morell largely basing his libretto on a 1687 novel by Robert Boyle, The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus, in which the eponymous Christian lovers choose death over forsaking their religion. It premiered at Covent Garden the following year, receiving a lukewarm response; it was left to much later musicians and audiences to recognise Theodora for the masterpiece it is.

Opera Australia and Pinchgut Opera performed Theodora as late as February this year,...