This year the Montreal Baroque Festival celebrated the 350th birthday of Marin Marais with performances and a recording of the orchestral music of his final opera, Sémélé. Although Marais's solo viol music has inspired numerous recordings, his four operas have yet to receive their due. The Concert des Nations recorded two instrumental excerpts from Marais's best known opera, Alcyone, and now this CD offers the instrumental backdrop for the prologue and five acts of Sémélé. The vocal music at the heart of these dramas still awaits a champion.

Neither a full score nor a set of parts survive, but the musicologist Gérard Geay composed the missing inner parts for the “short score” published in 1709, the job the young Marais himself undertook for Lully. Marais also conducted at the Opéra and so it is fitting that violist Wieland Kuijken conducts here. The results sparkle: careful attention has been paid to articulation and the set-up of the recording enables us to hear this music more as chamber music than incidental music to a drama.

Although the tremblement de terre that ends the opera was intended as the crowd-pleaser, the music of Acts 2 and 4 offers true delights. The descent of Jupiter (tr 14), the hints at dissonance that evoke the fête galante, the entertaining chaconne that follows in track 16, the obligatory visit to the Netherworld in Act 3, and the imaginative use of the hurdy-gurdy and drones in tracks 21_25 illustrate Marais's masterful command of tragédie lyrique.