On track: Ravishing arias from a heavenly partnership

Don't be put off by the coy images of Magdalena Kozena and Simon Rattle side-by-side on an 18th-century couch, with a well-manicured country estate rolling away behind them.

The couple's new Archiv collection of Mozart Arias is a sterling contribution to the Viennese composer's annus mirabilis, all the more so with the collaboration of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and fortepianist Jos van Immerseel.

Mozart did not write so much for mezzo-sopranos, but Kozena is a singer who has no trouble lifting her voice into the soprano range, as she did when she played Dorabella in the Met's Cosi fan Tutte last year.

On CD, when it comes to Cosi, she can be both the mistresses and the maid. She is a smitten Dorabella in E amore un ladroncello, a pleading Fiordligi in Per pieta and Despina at her most wickedly cynical in In unomi, in soldati.

From The Marriage of Figaro, she gives us a wonderfully bewildered Cherubino, his adolescent confusion caught in the fluttering ornamentation added by Domenico Corri who, as it happens, was born on this very day back in 1744. Ilia's Quando avran fine omai from Idomeneo was chosen by Kozena for its sizeable recitative and she offers a rich, finely observed interpretation. The subtle shifts of her emotions are underlined by the blend of Rattle's orchestral musicians and van Immerseel's keyboard.

If you know Rattle mainly for his charismatic performances of 19th and 20th-century music, it is worth remembering the impact he made when he conducted Idomeneo in 1985 at Glyndebourne, and then two years later in concert, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

Back then he was praised for everything from his combination of pungency and delicacy through to "a revealing sense of the heroic romantic".

This can still be heard in his contribution on this album, ravishingly caught in London's Lyndhurst Hall, especially in the vibrant tones of the woodwind, basset horns and all, beautifully displayed on one of the CD's curiosities, Al desio di chi tadora, a replacement aria from The Marriage of Figaro.

All in all, a partnership made in Mozartian heaven.

* Mozart - Arias (Archiv 477 6272)