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Jules Verne was the inspiration for Offenbach’s opéra-féerie, premiered in 1875. The Parisian craze for this type of musical extravaganza stemmed from its impressive stage effects: for Le Voyage dans la Lune, two ballets and some twenty sets took the audience from the Earth to the Moon, successively recreating the Paris Observatory, a working blast furnace and the crater of an erupting volcano. The piece is studded with zany characters and imaginary places: a lunar landscape, a glass palace, mother-of-pearl galleries, etc. The producers even borrowed a dromedary and an ostrich from the zoo at the Jardin d’Acclimatation! To accompany this theatrical display, Offenbach composed a series of colourful, picturesque hit numbers, wittily and energetically performed here by a team of enthusiastic soloists. The Chœur et Orchestre National Montpellier Occitanie are placed under the subtle and precise direction of Pierre Dumoussaud. © Bru Zane

In Jephté by Michel Pignolet de Montéclair, György Vashegyi directs – with style and energy – another riveting account of a neglected French Baroque opera. The work, based on the Biblical tale of a conquering general obliged, by a sacred vow, to sacrifice his own kin, became an immediate success in 1732, indeed a fixture in opera life in France, receiving over a hundred performances at the Opéra alone in the three decades following its première. Montéclair and his librettist Pellegrin were open to preparing revised versions of the opera and it is the third and conclusive edition which has been worked on by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and recorded by Vashegyi and his musicians. The central and demanding role of Iphise here is taken by Chantal Santon Jeffery, who is joined by Tassis Christoyannis as the unfortunate but successful-in-war title character, Judith van Wanroij as the bewildered but resolute mother and Thomas Dolié as the relayer of divine messages, Phinée. There is an imaginative and individual flair to Montéclair’s music, nurtured by his extensive orchestral pit experience at the Paris Opéra – and Jephté is a work of his maturity. As well as the tautness of the third edition, the fruits of all this experience are to be heard here with the Orfeo Orchestra showing its paces in zesty airs, minuets, marches and a chaconne, but also with a musettetinged pastoral celebration – this last also allows the Purcell Choir opportunities to excel; elsewhere, the choir is called on variously to represent warriors, Israelites, and companions of Iphise. © Glossa

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To say that André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry's 1784 comic opera, Richard Coeur de Lion, has a lot to answer for is something of an understatement, when it was its popular Act I air, “O Richard, O my King”, which in 1789 accidentally brought about one of the defining moments of the French Revolution: the air is sung by the imprisoned King Richard's knights who want to free him, and one night in 1789 it became the song French officers chose to sing to King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette under house arrest at Versailles after the couple turned up to greet the officers at a banquet thrown in the Royal Opera House; which in turn got interpreted by the Paris press as an anti-revolutionary act, leading to the palace being stormed and the royal couple taken away, never to return. Add the fact that Grétry was none other than Marie-Antoinette's favourite composer, and the opera was an obvious choice for the Royal Opera House's 250th anniversary season. Plus, the October 2019 production under the direction of Hervé Niquet was a wonderful one: fizzing with vivacious energy and fun, nailing its grandeur and intimacy in equal measure, all with just the right dose of heart-on-sleeve sentimentality, and from a no-exceptions superb cast of young talent - headed up by tenors Rémy Mathieu as Richard and Reinoud Van Mechelen as Blondel - supported by an on-fire Le Concert Spirituel. So, although with this live recording you don't get to enjoy the production's sumptuous late eighteenth century stage sets and concerts, the music making was of a level for it all still to be leaping out of the stereo regardless. What's more, the polished, immediate engineering has done a magnificent job of capturing the theatre's acoustics, meaning you really do feel as if you're sat there in the theatre's best seats. Then, while one might imagine that non-French speakers may get less out of the audio alone, given that the opera's action moves forwards not via sung recitatives but instead spoken texts, the reality is that the vim and melodious tones with which those spoken lines are dispatched actually amounts to a sort of music in itself. In short, thank goodness they snuck this one in before Covid, because it's a life-affirming triumph. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz

Parisian composer Jean Boyer’s Recueil d’airs à boire et danser from 1636 belongs to a genuinely French genre of drinking and dance songs, a more light-hearted offspring of the "Air de cour". The latter, a courtly secular strophic song, became one of the most important vocal genres in the first third of the seventeenth century in France. Among the many collections of chansons à boire et à danser of the time, Boyer’s are probably the most compelling, both rhythmically and harmonically, and the texts he chose to set to music are generally more refined than some of his contemporaries’. From the mere number of copies of most of these collections extant in many European libraries, we realize how well diffused and popular this type of repertoire was, while it has been left virtually untouched in the twenty-first century. © Ramée

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Psy 4 de la Rime rapper Soprano made his full-length album debut with Puisqu'il Faut Vivre (2007). It follows a few years' worth of solo mixtapes and two blockbuster hit albums with Psy 4 de la Rime, Block Party (2002) and Enfants de la Lune (2005). Itself a blockbuster hit album, Puisqu'il Faut Vivre includes a wealth of hit singles ("Halla Halla," "À la Bien," "Ferme les Yeux et Imagine Toi") and guest features (Diam's, Léa Castel, Psy 4 de la Rime).© Jason Birchmeier /TiVo

With this anthology of airs sérieux and airs à boire of the Grand Siècle, Les Arts Florissants launches a new series on harmonia mundi. We may listen to the tracks on this disc as contemporaries turned the pages of successful collections of songs alternating between invocations to Bacchus and invitations to love. Around William Christie at the harpsichord and his musicians, five singers offer multiple combinations of close-knit voices. From the intimacy of the salons to the liveliness of court banquets, these airs, models of refined skill, make light of the paradoxes of our hearts – for as an air by Lambert tells us: ‘Though Love creates all my grief, / I wish to love and to die loving.’ (Editor's Note) 

With each album, La Grande Sophie has sounded increasingly confident while incorporating several styles into her songs. The majority of Des Vagues et des Ruisseaux, however, is cast in folk-inflected adult alternative rock. Sophie sounds less self-conscious than ever, making it one of her most enjoyable albums to date.© Andy Kellman /TiVo

André Campra has the distinction of being the most prominent French opera composer in the decades between Lully and Rameau, but even the operas of those two great masters are so rarely performed or recorded that it's not surprising that Campra's are virtually unknown to modern audiences. That makes this very fine recording with Hervé Niquet leading Choeur et Orchestre du Concert Spirituel and Les Chantres du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles all the more valuable and welcome to fans of the French Baroque. Campra enthusiastically embraced the innovations of Italian opera, particularly the da capo aria, that Lully had scorned. The plot of Le Carneval de Venise (obviously) even takes place in Italy in an opera theater preparing a performance, and it involves an opera within an opera; it concludes with a performance of an operatic divertissement in Italian, Orfeo nell'inferi, in which Campra unabashedly adopts Italian conventions. The French sections are similar in sound and style to Lully's operas-ballets even though Campra doesn't have Lully's genius for simple, memorable melody. Orfeo nell'inferi very skillfully uses the florid manner of late 17th century opera, and the juxtaposition of the two styles, while intriguing to modern ears, must have been absolutely revolutionary to French audiences who were finally exposed to the innovations of Italian opera. The singers, chorus, and orchestra are skilled in both the Italian and French conventions of Middle Baroque performance practice and they offer a compelling account of the piece. The orchestra and the chorus (which is used very prominently in the French sections) play and sing with precision and lively energy. Niquet's tempos are fluid and he maintains a strong sense of momentum throughout. The soloists are never less than adequate and several stand out, particularly sopranos Salomé Haller and Sarah Tynan, tenor Mathias Vidal, baritone Andrew Foster-Williams, and bass Luigi de Donato. Glossa's sound is characteristically immaculate present and beautifully balanced. © TiVo