You might already know the title number of Maurice Yvain’s Yes! from Susan Graham’s treasurable French operetta album (Erato, 5/02); but did you ever stop to wonder why that particular monosyllable isn’t in French? All is now clear thanks to this first-ever recording of the full score (or something very like it, anyway). It’s the only word of English known to our ingénue heroine, the Parisian manicurist Totte. Fortunately – since the vermicelli heir Maxime Gavard is about to whirl her off to London for a quickie marriage – it’s the only one she’ll need.

Oh là là! Well, it’s 1928 and this is very much that kind of French operetta. Maxime already has one mistress (married, naturally) and Totte herself has a fiancé (conveniently enough, an aspiring opera singer), but this being Paris these are minor considerations beside the need – and quick! – to extricate Maxime from an arranged engagement to a South American heiress. Yvain and his librettists Albert Willemetz and Paul Géraldy whip the resulting romantic complications into a zesty little soufflé of remarkable tunefulness and charm.

It really fizzes, too: shot through with jazzy syncopation and melodies that dance an elegant line between saucy and sentimental. The spirit of Offenbach at his wickedest is somewhere in the background (Yvain’s tunes have a habit of turning into lilting waltzes, then tripping over themselves with a sudden time-change) but up front, it’s all Charlestons and two-steps, with a slangy libretto that references both the Ballets Russes and Maurice Chevalier. If an operetta could wear a bob and a flapper dress, Yes! would be that show. If it was a drink, it would be a kir royale.

And as performed by Les Frivolités Parisiennes (no conductor is credited), it goes straight to the head. This company performed Yes! on stage in 2016, and you can tell: there’s an effortlessness and a sense of ensemble about both the playing and singing. Like many operettas, Yes! exists in no definitive form. Premiered with a two-piano accompaniment at the tiny Théâtre des Capucines, by the height of its success it had acquired an orchestra of some 35 players. Les Frivolités use those full forces and also incorporate the original two pianos, for champagne sparkle and a touch of cabaret flair.

In the absence of spoken dialogue (replaced by a narration in French, with no translations provided), it must be said that you don’t get much sense of the (numerous) individual characters through the music alone. There are at least three singing characters whose presence goes wholly unexplained in the short synopsis. Alongside the bombastic bluster of the noodle magnate Gavard Père (Philippe Brocard, sounding bluff) and the Latin stylings of Maxime’s would-be wife Marquita (Irina de Baghy has a suitably tangy lower register), the character who emerges most vividly is Totte herself, and Sandrine Buendia sings sweetly and ardently with just a hint of (appropriate) Gallic tartness at the top.

Brocard apart, the men are not obviously operatic singers, but they hit their notes cleanly and have no difficulty carrying their individual lines in Yvain’s numerous ensembles – stepping lightly over some truly tongue-twisting lyrics. Their vibrato-lite style is entirely appropriate; you do wonder if they’d struggle with an orchestra of this size in a theatre but that doesn’t concern them here, and it needn’t concern us either. If a bubbly, slightly naughty 90 minutes in jazz-age Paris sounds like your idea of fun, the verdict can only be a resounding Oui.