Jean-Baptiste Morin is the composer credited with adapting the Italian cantata for a French audience. His cantatas, and most of those by his successors, are secular; but here are three based on subjects from the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. If their various companion pieces are as good, to explore the repertory would be a treat indeed.

Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was the most distinguished of a line of musicians and instrument-makers. Though known today primarily as a composer of harpsichord pieces, she published books of sacred cantatas in 1708 and 1711. They were scored for voice and continuo, with or without instruments: Le Tendre Amour offer violin, flute and oboe, together or separately, throughout the disc. The writing in The Crossing of the Red Sea is an effective mixture of da capo aria and French declamation, the opening recitative including a bass-line that vividly illustrates the Israelites’ fears. The Fall of Solomon by Sébastien de Brossard contrasts the king’s wisdom with his weakness for the distractions of love. It includes an air gayement in rondo form – the third stanza is missing from the booklet – with the theorbo of Sofie Vanden Eynde providing a haunting postlude. René Drouard de Bousset’s Judith, publishedin 1735, is firmly in the Italian format ofthree recitatives and arias: the last aria celebrates Judith’s murder of Holofernes, violin and oboe convincingly representingthe “bruyante trompette”.

Le Tendre Amour and Luanda Siqueira, a Brazilian singing with 18th-century pronunciation, perform these little-known pieces with passion and vitality. The booklet-notes are translated but not the texts.