This is a bit like old times from Les Arts Florissants, who first made their mark back in the early 1980s with Charpentier programmes just like this one, considerably raising the composer’s profile in the process. Here we have Les plaisirs de Versailles, a divertissement featuring an argument between the rival pleasures of Music and Conversation, the latter an ignorant chatterbox who continually interrupts the self-important Music to offer “inopportune praise” (a regular enough Versailles occurence, one can well imagine). When the two argue, Comus is prevailed upon to arbitrate. He tries chocolate, wine, even enlists the help of that other favourite Versailles pursuit, Gaming – but the two pleasures are eventually reconciled only in their shared admiration for the ‘Grand Roi’.
Rather more serious are the Airs sur les stances du Cid, settings for solo voice and continuo of lines from Corneille’s Le Cid, in which the horrified hero discovers that a man by whose death he must be avenged is his lover’s father; this is powerful, direct music which could have fallen straight out of a tragedie-lyrique. The third piece bats the mood firmly back in the other direction with one of Charpentier’s two Italian pastoralette, Amor vince ogni cosa, a pretty though inconsequential piece which shows Pan helping to bring together two pairs of fairly idiotic bucolic lovers.
The performances are in the typical William Christie mould, with the singers acting their roles with convincing commitment and everyone realizing the ways in which the music can be made to work as drama – slight though that is most of the time. Paul Agnew – evidently Christie’s favourite tenor at the moment – is excellent in the Stances du Cid, showing as he did in Les Arts Florissants’ recent recording of La descente d’Orphee aux enfers (5/96) an affecting blend of plaintive lyricism, ardent entreaty and fierce indignation as the situation demands. Of the other singers, too numerous to list here, I especially enjoyed the comic acting of Sophie Daneman, Katalin Karolyi and Steve Dugardin in Les plaisirs. The instrumental playing catches the mood of things too, though the violins have their uncomfortable moments and generally lack sweetness. And I should also warn of an irritating rattling noise (is it an organ key?) which bedevils the early part of the disc.'