Michel Pignolet de Montéclair has often been categorised merely in terms of having come in between Lully and Rameau, but actually he was a composer with considerable character of his own, a natural dramatist whose opera Jephté was acknowledged by Rameau as inspiration for his own first stage work, Hippolyte et Aricie.

The five chamber cantatas presented here (Montéclair wrote 24) are full of interest and imagination, revealing their composer’s ability to mould the music to genuinely sympathetic ends while retaining his French classical poise. As a bass player at the Opéra, he was aware of the role instruments could play, and some of the most effective touches here are when, for instance, the bass viol weeps with the lover in Le triomfe de la constance, or a muted violin squeaks out pained pipe music in Pan et Syrinx. The intimacy of these cantatas is affecting but Montéclair’s touch is no less assured in the more momentous operatic emotions of Le retour de la paix, La mort de Didon and the Italianate La morte di Lucretia.

Emma Kirkby singing French repertoire is a rare thing but her old friends London Baroque are steeped in it, and these performances are as stylish as one could wish. The sound, as often with BIS, is a touch swimmy but its fullness certainly lends weight to the music. Kirkby’s voice could have been brought further forward but her ever-present virtues of clarity, secure passagework and interpretative intelligence still emerge, if without the particular colouring and line a French singer might have brought to it. You can get that, if you want it, from an old disc featuring some of these cantatas from Les Arts Florissants (Harmonia Mundi, 6/89 – nla), though it comes with a few rough edges. But whether with that disc, this one or both, Montéclair is certainly worth getting to know.