György Vashegyi and his excellent Hungarian choir and orchestra follow up their two-disc set of grands motets by Mondonville (7/16) with the same composer’s first opera. Isbé is a pastorale-héroïque: performed at the Paris Opéra on April 10, 1742, it suffered, according to Benoît Dratwicki’s informative booklet note, from being compared unfavourably to Destouches’s Issé, revived a week earlier. The starry cast included Catherine-Nicole Le Maure, Pierre de Jélyotte, François Le Page and Marie Fel, all singers associated with the operas of Rameau.

Mondonville and Rameau were rivals, as successors to the revered Lully; both were influenced by contemporary Italian composers. Isbé is in the prologue and five-act format of the tragédie-lyrique but the lovers are united at the end and nobody dies. The Prologue, set in the Tuileries gardens, has Voluptuousness and Cupid yielding to Fashion. How this relates to the action of the opera is unclear. The shepherd Coridon loves the shepherdess Isbé: she loves him too but refuses to acknowledge the fact despite their being crowned with flowers in a ceremony organised on behalf of the druid Adamas. When Isbé’s reluctance is reported to him, Adamas decides – after receiving ambiguous advice from a forest god – to offer marriage. By Act 4, Isbé has decided to confess her love, but Coridon is determined to die. Balked of his wedding, Adamas utters dire threats but immediately repents and blesses the couple. Other complications include an attempt on Coridon’s virtue by Charité, and Isbé seeking and then rejecting the assistance of the sorceress Céphise.

The score consists of the usual succession of recitatives, airs, choruses and dances, with a couple of duets for the lovers. Many of the numbers are brief – the hour-long disc 1 contains 37 tracks – but where Mondonville allows himself to be expansive he writes music of real depth. Examples include the airs for Isbé that open Acts 1 and 4, and Adamas’s air in Act 2. The orchestration is excellently varied: Charité and Céphise both have airs accompanied only by the upper strings, while sombre cellos elsewhere recall the bass viols of Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée aux Enfers. Flutes, oboes and bassoon all have moments of glory, some of them possibly attributable to necessary editorial work done by Vashegyi and others.

Katherine Watson as the rather tiresome Isbé is particularly heartfelt in ‘Laisse-moi soupirer’. As Coridon, Reinoud Van Mechelen manages the high tessitura with ease, and Thomas Dolié is a superb Adamas, surely the most interesting character along with Chantal Santon-Jeffery’s naughty Charité. The live recording sounds well, but for the near-inaudible harpsichord continuo.