First of all, this is emphatically not one of your boxed sets hashed-together from reissues. In fact, the number of performances here which you might have heard before is quite small. The Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles — set up by the French government to research and perform French music from the years between 1600 and 1800 — have gathered together 20 CDs’ worth of alluring material, most of it from live recordings made last autumn by Radio France at concerts in various rooms of the Versailles palace. There are some further live recordings from earlier years which have since been made available on CD, while completing the mix is a tiny number of items borrowed from commercial studio recordings.

Given that the box is selling for around $100, this ought to be enough set French Baroque enthusiasts’ wallet-hands twitching, but the briefest of glances at the contents is surely a deal-clincher; the big Baroque names such as Lully, Charpentier, Couperin, Campra, Rameau and Lalande are there, but there are also a host of fascinating lesser figures, from men such as Moulinié, Dumont, Desmarest and Mondonville who make it onto disc only infrequently, to composers like Blamont, Francoeur, Destouches and Collasse who hardly ever get there at all. Add to that the fact that the collection includes music from the rarely investigated repertoire of the final third of the 18th century, and you are looking at a well planned and valuable document indeed.

Better news still: almost all the performances are good, and many of them are first rate. The reissues include one Gramophone Award winner in Rameau’s delicious choral motet In convertendo from William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, who also bring us further motets by Mondonville and Desmarest and the third of Couperin’s Leçons de ténebres in its most sensuous ever account by sopranos Sophie Daneman and Patricia Petibon (all these from Erato). There are more Desmarest motets from Hervé Niquet’s Glossa back catalogue, and Brossard from Christophe Coin’s Ensemble Baroque de Limoges, originally issued on Astrée Auvidis but now on Coin’s label Laborie. Extracts from Marc Minkowski’s DG live recording of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie complete the most high-profile reissues, but Olivier Schneebeli conducting choral works by Lully and Rigel has appeared before on K617 as has Jean-Claude Malgoire in motets by Gossec and Giroust.

The rest is all new, all discovery. Some certainties remain unchallenged, of course: Lully and Rameau are the dominant operatic figures, affirmed by powerful extracts from the former’s Isis and the latter’s Hippolyte the grand motet emerges as a medium of true nobility and depth in the successive hands of Dumont, Lully, Desmarest, Campra, Rameau and Mondonville; and Charpentier is shown as the giant of sacred vocal music he is by the presence of his Messe des morts, Litanies de la Vierge, and Miserere (the last two given strong, intelligently shaped performances by Ensemble Jacques Moderne under Joel Suhubiette.) But who would have thought that a musical evening at the court of Louis XIII, when Versailles was still a hunting lodge, could have been so varied and lively with its airs de cours by Boesset, Moulinié and Lambert as performed by Gerard Lesne’s Il Seminario Musicale? Surely few could have suspected that Lalande — so associated with the dignified world of the grand motet - was capable of the lusty orchestral sounds that emanate from and his Symphonies pour les soupers de Roi and his ballet Les folies de Cardenio (expertly played by Music Florea under Marek Stryncl and Ensemble Baroque de Limoges respectively). And how many have heard a note by François Cohn de Blamont (whose divertissement Égine reveals him as a man apparently intent on out-doing Rameau for orchestral and harmonic derring-do), or by the partnership of Francoeur and Rebel, represented here by their relaxed one-acter Zélindor, roi des Sylphes?

Most enlightening of all, however, is the music of Louis XVI’s time, of which all that people tend to know is what they gather from reading about the Parisian visits of Mozart and Gluck. The fact is that classical-period France produced much of interest, and the six discs devoted to that repertoire here offer as good a cross-section it as you are likely to find. There are extracts from tragic operas by two of the most popular names in late 18th-century opera, Sacchini (Oedipe a Colona) and Piccinni (Didon), and some gloomily Romantic scenes from forward-looking operas by Kreutzer, Monsigny, Lesueur nd Philidor. Gossec is probably the best-known name in classical-period France, but he is outshone on a disc of symphonies by Simon Leduc and Henri-Joseph Rigel, two composers whose talents for touchingly expressive melody are well realised by La Cercle de l’Harrnonie under Jérémie Rhorr, and on a disc of choral music by François Giroust and (again) Rigel, whose oratorio La sortie d’Égypte shows flashes of Berliozian dramatic innovation.

Is there anything missing? Well it seems strange that there are no grands motets by Lalande and no instrumental works by prominent court chamber musicians such as Couperin, D’Anglebert, Marais and Forqueray. The booklet contains some interesting general articles, but the individual programme notes are skimpy, and anyone who does not already have a good knowledge of the French Baroque will struggle to work out exactly what is going on (though French-readers may be able to find the original concert programme notes if and when they get added to the CMBV’s website archive). But hey, for anyone who loves French Baroque and Classical music, this box is a cast-iron must-have.

-- Lindsay Kemp, Gramophone [August 2008]