Here’s a bit of a surprise. Patricia Petibon, usually associated with Baroque and 18th-century music, reveals a robust sense of humour, a facility for opéra-bouffe, and the ability to send herself up. Go to track 3 and hear what I mean with her vivid ‘J’ai deux amants’ from Messager’s L’amour masque. Among modern singers, only the late-lamented Graziella Sciutti found so much to do with this harmless little bit of masculine-ego-baiting.

The other ‘essential track’, as they say in Tin Pan Alley, is the extract from Reynaldo Hahn’s Brummel. This isn’t the same aria that Susan Graham included in her French operetta disc a couple of years ago, but altogether raunchier couplets in which Lady Eversharp extols all the virtues of the dandyish hero, calling him all the names she can think of – ‘Libertin’, ‘Rustre éhonté’, ‘Triste goujat’ and worse – before admitting that he intoxicates and amazes her. It’s worth getting the CD for this track alone, and for Petibon’s final riotous encore piece, composed for her by Isabelle Aboulker, ‘Je t’aime’, a parody of all the soprano mad scenes of the past.

For the rest of the CD, Petibon sticks with the conventional French soprano repertory. Her Juliette is rather strident, then in the Delibes group she is better in a high-spirited ‘Les filles de Cadix’, than in the Bell Song and Flower Duet (with Karine Deshayes) from Lakmé, perfectly acceptable performances though both are. In the three Massenet arias, it is the scene for the fairy godmother from Cendrillon that comes off best. ‘Adieu, notre petite table’ is overly sentimental, and ‘Je marche sur tous les chemins’ proves a bit of an effort. Throughout, Petibon’s diction is superb, and there is always a sense of character, but she is such a natural comedienne that it’s in the arias where she has a chance to laugh that she is at her best. It’s always a pleasure to hear music from Chabrier’s L’Etoile and the sneezing song, ‘Enfin je sens mieux’, gives her another chance to go slightly too far.

Yves Abel and the Lyon National Orchestra and Chorus provide sterling support. As far as one can tell from the booklet-note, the only one of these roles that Petibon has sung on stage so far is Olympia in Les Contes d’Hoffmann. This was in a production by Olivier Py – ‘controversial’, she calls it – in which the doll had to appear naked all the way through. ‘We definitely broke barriers there,’ Petibon explains; on disc, when the machinery starts to go wrong, she adds some of the most outrageous funny-voice effects ever heard in this aria. It’s all a bit extreme, but as the cover photograph suggests, showing a bewigged Petibon riding on a fairground horse, she’s an original.