David et Jonathas seems like a full-scale Lullian opera, with a prologue and five acts, but was devised as a series of intermèdes presented between the acts of the spoken Latin tragedy Saül performed at the Jesuit college of Louis-le-Grand in 1688 (Pierre Chamillart’s play is lost). Last summer’s Aix-en-Provence production by Andreas Homoki treats the sacred drama as an energetic secular theatre piece, with some interventions regarding plot and structure. Most notably, the prologue (Saul’s desperate petition to the Ghost of Samuel on the eve of his doom) is persuasively relocated to between Acts 3 and 4 in order to shape the plot into a logical sequence of events. The entire drama is set within a plain wooden room that diminishes or expands according to the anguish of the protagonists. Flashback action during orchestral preludes suggests that Saul’s deceased wife was a peacemaker between troubled factions of the family when Jonathan and David were boys; the relocated prologue subdivides the set into three smaller rooms between which Neal Davies’s schizophrenic Saul hurls himself, plagued by plural visions of his dead wife (impersonated by chorus members) that metamorphose into Dominique Visse’s compelling witch.

William Christie claims that since their 1988 recording, Les Arts Florissants have become more experienced in performing at low French Baroque pitch and no longer cast countertenors in high tenor parts. Canadian haute-contre Pascal Charbonneau sings David’s softer sentimental music mellifluously – most notably the exiled David’s reluctance to face his own people in war (Act 1’s ‘Ciel! Quel triste combat en ces lieux me rappelle?’). Two disconsolate soliloquies in Acts 4 and 5 are profoundly moving: Ana Quintans emotively conveys Jonathan torn between filial (and political) duty and his loyalty to David (‘A-t-on jamais souffert une plus rude peine?’), and David’s lamentation over his beloved Jonathan’s body is devastating. Christie supervises an authoritative performance – although it is an uneasy incongruity that the drabness of the production (cloth caps and trilbies for Israelites; fezzes for Philistines) is at odds with a few sensuous pastoral passages and a victorious final chorus (which is predictably undermined by ironic stage action).