With this recording we enter a new phase of interpreting early music. Dominik Kiefer and his Capriccio colleagues approach the music of Lully from a fresh angle, by choosing to recreate the manner in which it was performed abroad in the decades immediately after the composer’s death, rather than focusing on the first performances at Versailles and in Paris.

Taking the editions of instrumental music from the Lully operas published in Amsterdam by Estienne Roger between 1697 and 1712 as their starting point, Capriccio assimilated the changes in the scoring that were made to suit musical establishments in London, Brussels and a number of German cities – shrinking the string textures from five to four voices; doubling both violin parts with winds rather than merely the first violin; using cellos rather than the less agile French basses and sometimes doubling them at the octave with a double bass – and here offer us three different possibilities.

For the listener (and critic) accustomed to the burnished opera recordings of Les Arts Florissants, Les Musiciens du Louvre and the Collegium Vocale/La Chapelle Royale, this is an ear-opener. The Swiss-based Capriccio orchestra perform suites of instrumental music from Lully’s Phaëton with a large orchestra, Atys with a small, soloistic ensemble and Armide with a medium-size court orchestra (or civic collegium musicum). The effects of these experiments are various; but, in general, the arrangements produce brighter, less blended, more polarised textures, especially when the double bass is present. Whereas Lully intended the orchestra to create an atmosphere in support of a spectacle, these versions must stand alone as concert music, without reference to singers or staging, and so rely more on ensemble brilliance, including more ornamentation and inégalité than Lully would have allowed.

Much the most successful of the three is the orchestration applied to Armide, both in terms of scale and because of the absence of the double bass. Capriccio has, nevertheless, provided a fascinating, valuable glimpse into the perils of presenting a very particular repertoire shorn of its original context and idiosyncratic orchestration.