This selection of airs and duets from – mostly – French operas reflects the careers of two sopranos who were significant figures in Paris during the last years of the ancien régime. Madame Saint-Huberty (1756-1812) retired from the Opéra in 1789; she ended up in Barnes, on the Thames, where she and her husband were assassinated by a servant for political reasons. Madame Dugazon (1755-1821) lay low for a while in Paris during the Revolution but returned to the stage before bowing out in 1804. They were not rivals in the sense that Cuzzoni and Bordoni were in Handel’s London: their repertoire was different and they probably never performed together. Véronique Gens and Sandrine Piau are not rivals, either: they are friends whose professional association dates back at least as far as the production of King Arthur that William Christie and Graham Vick brought to Covent Garden during the Purcell tercentenary year (Erato, 6/95). But it’s an amusing conceit – the folder enclosing the CD includes a photograph of them pretending to square up to each other – and a useful peg on which to hang some unfamiliar music. The booklet’s claim that all except the items by Gluck and Sacchini are ‘world premiere recordings’ will come as a surprise to those involved with the complete recording of JC Bach’s La clemenza di Scipione (CPO, A/02).

Sandrine Piau takes the roles sung by – or suitable for – Mme Dugazon, who was engaged by the Opéra-Comique and had the lighter voice; but there’s nothing light about the opening number, an air for the title-role in Monsigny’s La belle Arsène (1773) with a raging orchestral storm that includes thunderous timpani and a whistling piccolo. The next excerpt is a scène from Ariane dans l’île de Naxos. First performed in 1782, it remained in the repertoire of the Opéra till 1825. Powerful string octaves depict Ariadne’s rage, and the storm at the end brings trombones to the fore. Mme Saint-Huberty, for whom the opera was written, was not the only one here to come to a violent end. Edelmann, the composer, was guillotined in 1794 during the Terror alongside the nuns who became the subject of Poulenc’s Les dialogues des Carmélites. Véronique Gens, as ever, gets right inside the character.

Two airs, both sung by Gens, are less intense. In Grétry’s L’embarras des richesses (1782), Rosette sings of her love in a strophic setting of three stanzas. Equally simple, preceded by an accompanied recitative, is Armide’s ‘Barbare amour’ from Sacchini’s Renaud, performed later in the same season. The air for Pauline from Fanny Morna (1799) by Persuis, a composer of whom I must admit I’d never heard, is intriguing. A long orchestral introduction leads into a passage of mélodrame (speech combined with accompaniment), followed by a slow air, sweetly sung by Piau, with a contrasting second part and then a reprise.

In later life, Mme Dugazon took on more mature parts. Pauline was one; another was Camille in Dalayrac’s opera (1791), joined here by her son Adolphe. In Démophon (1788), Cherubini’s first work for the Opéra, Mme Saint-Huberty created the part of Dircé. The third duet is from La clemenza di Scipione (1778), already mentioned. This was Bach’s last opera for London, unlikely to have been performed by either diva; Gens takes the castrato role of Luceio, alternating and combining at the end with Piau’s Arsinda in dazzling coloratura. The other opera in Italian is La clemenza di Tito, composed for Naples in 1752. Gluck reused Sesto’s ‘Se mai senti’, with its beautiful oboe solo, in Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). Piau sings it most winningly, the reprise lightly decorated.

The only slight disappointment is the best-known piece of all, ‘Divinités du Styx’ from Gluck’s Alceste (Paris, 1776). The conductor Julien Chauvin doesn’t allow Véronique Gens to give sufficient emphasis to the opening phrase and its repetitions: a matter of both tempo and phrasing. Otherwise Le Concert de la Loge – how absurd that the orchestra is forbidden to use the full 18th-century name ending in ‘Olympique’ – provides support that is virile and tender, as appropriate. The booklet is silent on the dramatic context, not even giving act and scene numbers. But Benoît Dratwicki writes interestingly on the ‘Rivales’. And the two singers are magnificent.