“Why choose these arias? Why do a disc at all?” Having impishly posed the question in the booklet for his new CD, out on Sony Classical, none of Simon Keenlyside’s answers seems quite satisfactory. So let’s try our own: Keenlyside is Britain’s best baritone (Terfel, surely, errs closer to bass), and his under-representation on record is one of the great oversights of the classical music industry.

Maybe Keenlyside himself is partly to blame. He is unlikely to play the record companies’ usual games of moody photoshoots and mushy Mozart. And even the repertoire that he unearths for this collection has some surprises: Massenet’s Hérodiade pops up next to The Barber of Seville, while a slice of Cilea’s obscure L’Arlesiana comes sandwiched between showpieces from Pagliacci and The Queen of Spades.

But these are all good yarns, and Keenlyside’s biggest gift is for telling a story and creating a character. His King Herod smoulders with passion for the teenage Salome in the Massenet and his William Tell is noble and stirring in Sois Immobile, a Rossini aria that couldn’t be more different from the Barber’s Largo al Factotum, which Keenlyside expertly dispatches with unusual virility and bravado.

His Verdi, though, is more controversial. “Verdi too demands a restraint,” Keenlyside argues in his CD notes — and he has a point. But if his soft-grained, lyrical baritone still seems a shade too small for Verdi’s mighty dramas, he phrases so stylishly that he can almost be forgiven.

In any case, there are better tales to be told. The prologue from Pagliacci eschews any dubious verismo grandstanding, even as Keenlyside honours the great baritones of the past by tackling it, and the full- blooded accompaniment from Ulf Schirmer and the Münchner Rundfunkorchester is shown off to best effect in this barnstormer.

Yet it’s the Mozart that takes us straight to the heart of Keenlyside’s skill. On one side, the seductive Don Giovanni, suave and silky in his Act II serenade, and on the other, Keenlyside’s greatest creation, Papageno from The Magic Flute — a funny man, yes, but also a real one.

NIGEL FISHER