Croatian countertenor Max Emanuel Cencic appears all too rarely in the UK, and his Wigmore debut, with the Italian period band Il Pomo d’Oro and its violinist founder-director, Riccardo Minasi, had something of the air of a great occasion about it. With a programme of music by Vivaldi and his contemporaries, it was in many respects an exceptional evening, if perhaps not always in ways one might have expected.

There’s no mistaking the greatness of Cencic’s voice, with its dark, androgynous tone and its extraordinary liquidity. It enables him to sustain long, exacting lines, and to tackle the most formidable coloratura with dexterity and ease. The sheer beauty of his singing was consistently breathtaking and, at times, seemed almost like an end in itself.

Yet there were also occasional inequalities in his communicative powers. He used scores for a specialist repertoire you would have expected him to know from memory, which lent the recital an introverted quality – one that strikingly contrasted with his flamboyant platform persona and dazzling red-and-gold outfit. Words slipped a bit in some of the trickier numbers. Yet in the declamatory Sposa, Non Mi Conosci, from Giacomelli’s Merope, he attained a tragic nobility of utterance, of which we could have done with a bit more throughout the evening.

Cencic wasn’t the only star on the platform. Il Pomo d’Oro is a wonderful ensemble, and Minasi an outstanding musician, who knows exactly how to let voice and accompaniment form a whole, but also allows himself and his players to shine when the opportunity arises. When Cencic was taking a breather, Minasi gave us concertos by Vivaldi and sinfonias by Brescianello, dancing as he played, communicating his joy in music-making to us and to his ensemble, and bringing the house down with his virtuosity.