‘Who he?’ you may well ask of Thomas-Louis Bourgeois (1676-1750), a name known only the most avid of French Baroque aficionados. Born in Hainault, he began his career as maître de musique at Strasbourg Cathedral, sang as an haute-contre (high tenor) at the Paris Opéra, and then led something of a peripatetic existence before finally returning to Paris, where he died in poverty and obscurity. A brief biographical entry in Le Parnasse François of 1755 notes, laconically, that ‘his restless spirit’ (inconstance) prevented him from fully realising his talents.

In the early decades of the 18th century, when his reputation was at its height, Bourgeois was famed for his chamber cantatas, a genre popularised by the works of Jean-Baptiste Morin. Responding to the new Parisian vogue for Italian music, the five cantatas recorded here combine an Italianate lyrical warmth and brilliance with Gallic grace and fastidiousness of declamation. All are based on lustful episodes in Greek mythology, sanitised and prettified for the Age of Reason (Boreas’s rape of Oreithyia, for instance, here becomes unthreatening consensual sex). While the default setting is pastoral charm, with the voice often in colloquy with the amorous warbling flute, Bourgeois conjures moments of vivid drama, especially in Borée and in the highly expressive recitatives for the lovelorn Psyche.

In fresh, free voice, Carolyn Sampson does Bourgeois proud. She understands that airy grace and languid sensuality are of the essence, but never falls into the trap of winsomeness. Singing in clear French, she phrases alluringly (not least in Psyche’s tender supplication to Cupid), points key words without exaggeration and relishes the opportunities for dramatisation: say, in the tempest unleashed by Boreas, abetted by frenetically strumming continuo, or the dialogue between capricious Cupid and distraught Psyche. Le Concert Lorrain are inventive, stylistically acute collaborators, with Alexis Kossenko beguiling in the many flute obbligatos. While Bourgeois’s cantatas may not quite rival Rameau’s or Clérambault’s in melodic and harmonic piquancy, in such delectable performances they make a very welcome discovery.