A religious man and something of a deep thinker, the German countertenor Andreas Scholl has gone in search, it would seem, of paradise lost. His latest task, undertaken with the suave, Ravenna-based period band the Academia Bizantina, has been to unearth the work of composers associated with the Academia Arcadia, the select group of artists and intellectuals who hovered around Queen Christina of Sweden during her long exile in Rome.

The Arcadians hankered after a return to the pastoral ideal of the golden age of classical mythology, which Scholl, unsurprisingly, equates with the garden of Eden. The bulk of his material - cantatas by largely forgotten composers such as Francesco Gasparini and Benedetto Marcello - deals with innocence teetering on the brink of experience as man heads towards the fall.

Whatever the importance of Scholl's musicological discoveries, however, the concert proved problematic. The music, aspiring to direct simplicity of expression, frequently achieved mere blandness. Scholl's decision to end his recital with Vivaldi - no Arcadian, by any means - only amplified our awareness of Gasparini's and Marcello's defects.

Though the peerless beauty of his voice is beyond dispute, Scholl was hampered here by the music's taxing vocal range and its emotional narrowness. Marcello and Gasparini wrote for castrati rather than countertenors, and Scholl was occasionally pushed beyond his limits. The low-lying coloratura of Gasparini's Destati, Lidia Mia forced him to abandon falsetto for his chest voice, with ungainly results.

At his best, expressing spiritual exaltation or tragic anguish, Scholl also seemed ill at ease with his subject matter. Lovestruck shepherds simply aren't his thing, I'm afraid. It was only when he reached Vivaldi's Cessate, Omai Cessate that we heard him at his best. What had felt like a long evening proved worthwhile just for that.