This is the New Chamber Opera’s second recorded foray into Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s incidental theatre music: while their first centred on music composed for Molière after the playwright’s break with Lully (4/98), this second CD presents incidental music for the dramas of Pierre Corneille.

Charpentier was commissioned to compose ballet music as entr’actes for a Jesuit production of Corneille’s Polieucte being mounted at the Collège d’Harcourt in 1680. The music calls for a four-part string band and continuo, with just a single outing for trumpets and timpani in the ‘Marche de Triomphe’ (track 36).

Two years later, Charpentier composed music for a Comédie Francaise revival of Corneille’s Andromède (the music by Dassoucy for the original 1650 production, if not already lost, was evidently not deemed good enough to retain), which was positioned in direct competition with Quinault’s and Lully’s new opera Persée, based on the same myth.

A decade earlier (in the early 1670s) Lully had begun amassing the privileges that enabled him to dominate Parisian theatre music: only he could produce sung dramas and, furthermore, his competitors were allowed to engage no more than two singers and six instrumentalists. The challenge for Charpentier was to do the best he could within these restrictions.

His stratagems included allowing actors to take singing roles and soloists to come together as a choral ensemble; this meant that some solo parts had to be more simply cast than others, and that the choruses were mostly homophonic (for example, the jolly Choeur d’Ethiopiens, tracks 17 and 20). To enliven the instrumental timbres he chose musicians who could play several different instruments (two string players – or perhaps two actors – would have doubled on the recorder); and he composed in leaner, four-part textures instead of Lully’s more lavish five.

Undaunted by the recordings of French ensembles which have dominated this field for the past quarter of a century, Gary Cooper seems determined to offer a fresh, relatively understated alternative to the often highly sophisticated interpretations to which we have become accustomed. The sound is delicate rather than resonant, but there is variety both in the music itself and in the New Chamber Opera’s performances.

The rhythmic motives that characterise the individual dances aren’t always quite as highly sprung as I would have liked and, in general, the tempi seemed slowish (the second section of the ‘Marche de Triomphe’ is even a little limp). Their performance of Andromède also lacks the drama I would have expected of the music. The word ‘gentle’ recurs too often in my listening notes (‘gentle lilt’, ‘gently dotted’). The most spirited playing is in the two airs of the Intermède between the forth and fifth acts of the play (tracks 23 and 24), the first like quicksilver, the second swashbuckling.