The tonal quality of a countertenor, generally speaking, depends on the amount of physical heft he includes in his falsetto singing. Some deliver a practically disembodied sound, with a silvery, almost angelic quality; others sing more directly from the body.

Jakub Józef Orliński, the brilliant Polish countertenor who made his first appearances in the Bay Area over the weekend, lands in a middle ground. His singing is utterly pure and unruffled, but it also boasts a golden coloration that lends it a sumptuous fullness. It’s vivacious, tender and utterly ravishing.

For his Berkeley recital on Sunday, March 13, presented in Hertz Hall by Cal Performances, Orliński also demonstrated how effectively a countertenor can colonize repertoire written for other voice types. The program (which was also given on Friday, March 11, at Stanford Live) included the expected Baroque excerpts, with a welcome emphasis on Henry Purcell, but Orliński took the opportunity to evangelize for more recent music by Polish composers rarely heard in this country.

The result was a thrilling blend of elegance and discovery, not to mention a healthy dose of showmanship — Orliński is a cutup who flirts shamelessly with the audience. One song after another emerged in a fluent stream of expressive immediacy, tonal luster and perfectly shaped passagework, all of it tossed off with the kind of insouciant ease that only comes from arduous preparation behind the scenes.

Orliński had a terrific partner in pianist Michał Biel, who always seemed able to judge when and how much to make his own presence felt. It’s rare to feel this much excitement over the instrumental introductions and postludes in a vocal recital, but Biel’s crystalline playing was in keeping with Orliński’s artistry.

If Purcell is a special interest for Orliński, it can only be because of the composer’s distinctive melodic style, which combines pointedly disjointed leaps with an emphasis on lyrical fluidity. In the famed “Music for a While,” Orliński cast an ingratiating spell that still made space for the piece’s explosive interludes, and he brought plenty of rhythmic exuberance to “Strike the viol” (which returned for another go-round as the second of the three encores).

Yet Orliński, who is scheduled to make his local operatic debut this fall in Gluck’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” at the San Francisco Opera, proved most exciting in the context of Purcell’s dramatic numbers. The “Cold Song” from “The Fairy Queen” — whose almost immobile melody and shivering vocal phrases are a tour de force of depicting bone-chilling frigidity — elicited a vivid performance, and the stormy stretches of “Your Awful Voice I Hear” (from “The Tempest”) practically leapt off the stage.

除了巴洛克式产品外，还包括J.J. Handel的摘录。Fux，以及（在Encores中）Vivaldi和Nicola Fago -Orliński在浪漫歌曲传统中坚定地工作的三位波兰作曲家陷入了歌曲。

Those included a trio of Pushkin settings by Henryk Czyż, whose arching, poignant melodic phrases brought Rachmaninoff to mind, and two songs — one tragic, one comic — by Stanisław Moniuszko. The bulk of the afternoon, though, was given over to a set of 11 songs by Mieczysław Karłowicz, which cycled through all the traditional Romantic strains of lost love, found love, stargazing and so on. Orliński and Biel were the strongest imaginable advocates for all of it.