The Mozartists play this repertoire with a mix of urgent spirit and plumbed depths…Skerath voices the various heroes and heroines, exploring the full emotional range of the lesser-known parts of this stormy repertoire…A genuinely fascinating start to what will doubtless be an illuminating, if emotionally harrowing series.

Page’s projects with The Mozartists are distinguished not only by exemplary standards of performance but also by the ambition and imagination that underpin them…[Skerath] is suitably dramatic in first recordings of arias from operas by Jommelli and Traetta…What horns (Gavin Edwards and Nick Benz), and with what freedom they are encouraged to make their mark!...The playing throughout is excellent and the programme is as deeply satisfying as the project’s entire conception.

The Jommelli and Traetta excerpts…find Skerath in command of agile coloratura allied to considerable (and very necessary) dramatic gifts. She is unerringly supported by Page, whose expected idiomatic empathy with all this music is complemented by playing that demonstrates his keen ear for orchestral balance. This is a splendid collection that whets the appetite for further exploration of this intriguing repertoire.

This music from the turbulent 1760s — the first part of a seven-disc project, performed with great brilliance — is a startling ear-opener...it’s composers ignored in most textbooks — Tommaso Traetta (a ferociously dramatic recitative from his opera Sofonisba) and Franz Beck(a remarkable G minor symphony) — who really make you sit up.

The Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement is all about high drama, something Ian Page and the Mozartists, playing with scintillating edginess, offer in abundance here, colliding Chiara Skerath’s thrilling singing of opera arias by the once justly celebrated Niccolo Jommelli and Tommaso Traetta with turbulent symphonies by Haydn and Franz Ignaz Beck.

The real discovery here is the 22-minute symphony by Franz Beck from the early 1760s which sounds as though it should have been written 35 years later; a real gem for strings and horns only. The Swiss soprano Chiara Skerath is splendidly dramatic and elegantly hysterical (a truly 18th-century concept) without straying from period norms.