Issued ahead of the 150th anniversary of Bizet’s death in June, this remarkable Bru Zane set traces his compositional development through works that either hover on the fringes of the repertory or have remained unheard since the 19th century. It includes a new recording of Djamileh, his penultimate opera, widely regarded as among his first genuinely mature works and a notable precursor to Carmen. The set also continues Bru Zane’s examination of music written for the Prix de Rome, which Bizet won in 1857. Piano works and songs, meanwhile, remind us both of his initial promise as a pianist and of his prominence as a salon habitué in the 1860s.

The Prix de Rome works reveal in embryo the qualities we primarily associate with him: an instinctive gift for melody; a remarkable understanding of orchestral sonority; and a deep awareness both of the expressive capabilities of the human voice and the dramatic potential of understatement. The 1855 cantata Le retour de Virginie, a trial-run exercise set by his Conservatoire teacher Fromental Halévy, derives from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie, and the shimmering strings and filigree woodwind that summon up the paradisaical island where the pair fall in love are both ravishing and quite astonishingly original. The mature Bizet would have better integrated the Gounod-esque central prayer into the surrounding storm that wrecks the ship transporting Virginie back from France, but the work’s beauty, superbly captured by Ben Glassberg and his Lyon orchestra, is undeniable. Cyrille Dubois makes an outstanding Paul, too, completely at ease with the exacting tessitura of his immense opening aria.

Clovis et Clotilde, Bizet’s winning cantata in 1857, is more homogeneous if more conventional, indebted to Halévy’s own grands opéras. The subject is the conversion and baptism of the Frankish King Clovis at the instigation of Saint Remigius (Rémy), and its lofty exaltation admirably suits Julien Chauvin’s austere-sounding Le Concert de la Loge. Julien Dran and Karina Gauvin are excitingly grand in manner as Clovis and his wife Clotilde, but the great performance here comes from Huw Montague Rendall, fervent and glorious in tone as Rémy.

Vasco da Gama (1860), one of Bizet’s Roman ‘envois’, is an epic ode-symphonie for reciter, soloists, chorus and orchestra after the fashion of Berlioz’s Lélio, depicting Vasco’s voyage to India in 1497 98. Mélissa Petit does exquisite things with the familiar ‘Ouvre ton coeur’ (which was published separately), for the officer Léonard played by a soprano. The wonderfully assured choral writing finds the Flemish Radio Choir on thrilling form, and David Reiland conducts his Metz orchestra with exhilarating panache. The same forces also give us some of Bizet’s shorter competition choruses, which, significantly, sound like operatic extracts rather than self-contained works.

Divided between Adèle Charvet and Reinoud Van Mechelen, the songs leave one with mixed feelings. Elegant and refined, many are beautiful in themselves. In quantity, however, you notice a sameness of mood, inclining towards melancholy or regretful wit, and a lingering slowness of approach that can cloy. Charvet is lovely throughout but Van Mechelen seems at times disengaged, his trademark cleanness of line, telling in Baroque music, less suited to this altogether more Romantic repertory.

Djamileh, meanwhile, gets its finest performance on disc from François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles. Its orientalist portrait of the caliph Haroun – who takes, then discards, a new mistress every month, only to find the tables turned when Djamileh, who adores him, tricks him into revealing the depth of his feelings for her – can be tricky for today’s audiences. Yet we’re also reminded here of the way Bizet subverts its immediate context, with his self-determining heroine and his razor-sharp understanding of masculine self-deception. Roth is marvellously alert to both its ambiguous subtleties and the way Bizet makes the smallest of musical gestures speak emotional volumes, and there are wonderful central performances from Isabelle Druet’s sensuous Djamileh and Sahy Ratia, stylish and attractive as Haroun. As always with Bru Zane, the production values are high, both in terms of the immaculate recorded sound and the beautifully illustrated accompanying book with its scholarly articles. It all adds up to an outstanding, engrossing set, in short, that adds immeasurably to our understanding of Bizet and his world.