We all would fancy a night out at the Opéra Royal de Versailles, but only a few of us manage it, so a CD like this remains our next best. Not only do we hear the incidental music that Lully composed for Molière’s Bourgeois gentilhomme, but we are also treated to crucial parts of the spoken dialogue, staged sound effects and the enlivening response of the audience when the performance was recorded in November 2001.

The first disc opens with a prologue – a ‘Ballet des Nations’, with solo and ensemble airs in Spanish (accompanied by guitar and castanets), Italian (with violins) and French (with flutes). The highlight of the ballet is track 3, a crowd scene with bit parts for characters of wildly different social status, evident from their varied French accents. This is but a taste of what is to come in the play, where the posh voices of the servants sharply contrast with the cringe-making utterances of their patron, Monsieur Jourdain, and the absurd nonsense-syllables of the faux Turks in the course of the bourgeois gentilhomme’s ‘ennoblement’ (for example, ‘ioc’ is translated as ‘non’, but to an English-speaker it sounds more like ‘yuk’!).

Musically, there are many attractive individual contributions to the entertainment by both the vocal soloists and the orchestra. I particularly enjoyed the manner in which the soprano Francoise Masset invests the ‘Air pour la sérénade’ with richness and melancholy. And with Francois-Nicolas Geslot and Jean-Louis Georgel she very effectively characterises the passions expressed by music (CD1, tracks 23 and 26). The orchestra joins the vocal trio to conclude the scene (Act 1 scene 2) with a wonderful passacaille-like ‘Ritournelle’ (track 30), which hints at the great finales of Lully’s later tragédies lyriques. The hilarious ‘Cérémonie Turque’ concluding the play is beautifully paced. In the course of the well-known Marche (CD2, track 12) which begins delicately with strings, Hugo Reyne cleverly builds up the texture and the Ottoman associations with the gradual introduction of winds, tambourine, bells and finally a fife.

If there are quibbles, they are slight. The booklet does not include the extracts of spoken text; nor are there translations of the texts Lully set to music. The Spanish air ranges rather too high for Bruno Boterf in the ballet and the recorded sound of Reyne as the music student, presumably singing from his place in the orchestra (CD1, track 20), is patchy. By the end of the second disc, however, the unmistakable impression is of a wonderful evening of musical theatre.