Over the last few years, French counter-tenor Philippe Jaroussky has established himself as something of a sex symbol in the world of baroque music. Audiences clearly adore him, and it's not difficult to see why. He exudes bags of gauche, rather boyish charm on a concert platform. More important, perhaps, is his obvious enthusiasm for the material he performs. It is an appealing, hugely popular combination.

Jaroussky's singing, however, is sometimes curiously paradoxical. His voice isn't large, though the sound is at once unusual and striking, with an extraordinary fullness in his upper registers that more than compensates for an occasional thinness of tone down below. His programme, meanwhile, consisted of chamber cantatas by Scarlatti and Handel, with a couple of operatic arias by the latter thrown in. Mostly dealing with unrequited love, it allowed Jaroussky both to capitalise on his romantic image and to display what is unquestionably a formidable vocal technique.

He has an often-breathtaking ability to sustain long, hovering lines in his upper registers, while his coloratura is always expressive rather than overtly showy. The whirling phrases of Deh! Non Dir, from Handel's Ottone were all about desire and self-delusion rather than ostentation. He proved less imaginative when it came to the recitatives in the cantatas, however, all too frequently treating them as linking passages rather than integrating them dramatically. He was accompanied by the Ensemble Artaserse, which he founded in 2002 for the purpose of performing small-scale 17th- and 18th-century works. They spent an irritating amount of time tuning between numbers, though they play this music with a lucid sensitivity matched by few.