This isn’t quite the usual season for leçons de ténèbres, but here we have two versions of Couperin’s surviving settings, the three for the Wednesday of Holy Week: he composed the Thursday and Friday ones, too, but those are lost. The pieces, traditionally cast for soprano voice or voices, with continuo only, are settings from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, each verse preceded by a mournful, highly melismatic setting of the Hebrew letter-name that serves to number it, and culminating in a symbolic final plea for Jerusalem to return to God. Most of the performances I have heard of this very individual and very French repertory – there are examples by Charpentier, Michael Lambert, Lalande, Brossard and others from around 1700 – are done with much delicacy and a sense of what I suppose could be called ecclesiastical decorum. That is how one might imagine things were in Louis XIV’s chapel.

In the new spirit these days of early music-making, neither of these discs is quite like that. Indeed the version by XVIII-21 Musique des Lumières is very dramatically, very consciously, projected – sung in what might almost be called a flamboyant style. But then, here they are not presented as Louis XIV would have heard them. The recording evidently arose from dramatic performances given in Besançon in 2001. In place of the plainchant framework, they have here a prefatory vocal improvisation by Marco Horvat, responses in the form of an Arab lament for Jerusalem (by Rachid Benabdeslam) and a Jewish lament from Polish sources (sung by Horvat), and in place of the final Miserere a short new composition by Gérard Pesson, Contra me, built of fragments from the psalm beginning with the word ‘Miserere’.

While I can sympathise with the thinking behind this composite work, I am not really convinced that it holds together, at least not without the visual element that originally belonged to it. The singing of the Couperin is impassioned, especially from Stéphanie Révidat, bright and full in tone, vehement in expression, the detail of the lines sharply etched; Cyrille Gerstenhaber is perhaps more skilful at the broader shaping of the lines and rather less emphatic in manner. The dynamic changes are strongly marked though the logic behind them sometimes eluded me.

Le Parlement de Musique seem to me to capture the essential style of the leçons more surely, with singing more poised, more in keeping with the dignity of the occasion, from Kirsten Blase and also from Salomé Haller, who brings careful, shapely singing and a feeling for the long lines to the second leçon; the continuo playing, too, gives a good sense of flow towards the cadences. There is also some passion here, for example in the long setting of ‘Lamed’ in the third leçon, which is for two voices. Perhaps the treatment of linear detail here is not quite as precise as on the other CD. But the prefatory words and the response are sung in plainchant, which of course gives the leçons a much more appropriate context. The final Miserere is apparently a setting by Lalande, arranged by Brossard.

That however is left unexplained and not properly identified: the only reference to it is on the back of the CD case – it is not mentioned in the booklet. Both these booklets seem to me unsatisfactory and inconsiderate to the listener in their treatment of the text: the first prints French and English translations of the leçons but not the Latin that is sung; the second prints the Latin and a French version but not on the same page (and no English). Musically, however, the Parlement de Musique recording is certainly to be preferred.