Here we are at the dawn of opera, and there is a tangled tale to tell. A key figure is Ottavio Rinuccini, the librettist of Dafne, first performed in Florence in 1598. Two years later, for the celebrations of the wedding of Maria de’ Medici to Henri IV of France, he wrote Euridice for one of his collaborators on Dafne, Jacopo Peri. This was performed on October 6, 1600, three days before the main musical spectacle, Il rapimento di Cefalo by Peri’s colleague and rival, Giulio Caccini. Peri would not have been pleased by Caccini’s insistence on substituting his own music in parts of Euridice, and he must have been furious that Caccini went on to set the whole opera and publish it a few weeks ahead of his own version.

This second Euridice was not performed until December 1602. Strangely, Caccini retained Rinuccini’s prologue, with its references to the forthcoming wedding and to “Senna real” – the “royal Seine”. The version of the legend is more or less as in Monteverdi’s Orfeo, except that Orpheus is led to the underworld by Venus, he pleads with Pluto rather than Charon, and there is no second death for Eurydice.

Anyone expecting the richness and variety of Orfeo will be disappointed. Whereas Monteverdi made use of wind, brass and strings, Caccini prescribes no instruments at all. Much of Euridice is made up of the newly invented recitative, rather blandly harmonised. But it is all zestfully put across by this young French ensemble, with a large group of continuo instruments that includes the theorbo of the impressively multitasking Nicolas Achten. In fact the performance is on a par with the excellent account of Peri’s Euridice under Roberto de Caro, recorded in 1992 on Arts Music.