Once primarily associated with pop, the album tour has increasingly become the property of classical singers. This was effectively Andreas Scholl's Arias for Senesino gig. Senesino, subject of the German countertenor's latest CD, was an inspirational castrato, for whom composers scrambled to write music, and for whom Handel created a number of roles that have of late very much become Scholl's own.

The disc, though beautiful, suffers from an occasional sameness of pace and mood. The concert, fleshed out with orchestral contributions from the excitable Academia Bizantina under its laid-back director Ottavio Dantone, was infinitely more engrossing. In some respects it offered us a rather different Andreas Scholl from the one we have hitherto known. His voice remains, of course, at once peerless and unique. People who don't usually like counter-tenors simply love him, and countless critics, myself included, have resorted to words like "supernatural" or "angelic". In this instance, however, the angel came down to earth a bit.

A deeply religious man, Scholl has tended to cultivate an air of spiritual stillness on the concert platform, which sometimes comes over as lofty or unbending. A recital of operatic arias, however, requires the human differentiation of the figures it contains, and here we found Scholl resorting to dramatic gestures and an engaging physicality in his search for characterisation. In an aria from Albinoni's Engelberta, he beamed with pleasure at the thought of abandoning temporal power for a life of tranquillity in the country. As Giulio Cesare, he was very much the stiff-backed imperial warrior, expressing his dreams of conquest in coloratura of breathtaking accuracy. Though some of the vocal writing lay a fraction too low for him - a problem faced by most counter-tenors tackling music written for castrati - his singing, throughout, was phenomenal. A great evening.