Sometimes one heads to a concert alert with uncertainty about the event. For example, here was one of the big-name lyric tenor charmers popping up in the relative intimacy of Cadogan Hall, in a programme of Mozart, not the Italian warhorses. And he was singing not even mainstream operatic Mozart, but concert arias that mostly remain on the margins of the repertoire.

Yet if Rolando Villazón is no longer the new Domingo, he is perhaps the new Villazón. Nowadays, the personable Mexican tenor is tiptoeing more carefully around the repertoire. But this concert with the 31-strong Basel Chamber Orchestra, directed by Florian Donderer, grew in plausibility. By the end, it felt like a serious reinvention project, well executed by a singer of note, to illuminate neglected arias by someone who never wrote anything that can be overlooked.

Villazón started with Si mostra la sorte from 1775 – dark in tone, well judged as a warm-up. It was followed by the more ambitious Per pietà, non ricercate and Misero! O sogno, both from the Vienna years, more dramatically ambitious and demanding pieces, the weight of the Villazón voice beginning to adjust to the composer's demands, but not yet fully tested.

That test came in the second half, in which Villazón sang three concert arias, each preceded by a well-played movement from Mozart's Prague symphony. It was a curious arrangement, but each one was a gem, starting with the youthful Va, dal furor portata, Mozart's first published vocal work, full of coloratura virtuosity and written in Chelsea, just down the road from the venue, when he was nine. Then came the more maturely finished Dove mai trovar quel ciglio from 1784, a witty operatic piece that felt like an aria for a tenor Papageno, delivered with great character, and finally Or che il dover, elegantly confident, rising to a ringing anthem of praise to the archbishop of Salzburg. The more demanding the arias got, the more Villazón gave. And with it, the evening passed from the merely dutiful to the increasingly convincing.