The fast trickle of new Lully opera recordings continues to run its course providing Baroque music lovers with some of the most enjoyable and revealing new discoveries currently to be had. Here, within a year of the appearances of excellent first recordings of Thésée and Psyché, we have Proserpine, in another world premiere, this time from a new source, Hervé Niquet and his Frencher-than-French ensemble Le Concert Spirituel.

Lully’s tragédie lyrique for 1680 tells the familiar tale of Proserpine’s abduction by the underworld king Pluton, the upset it causes her mother Cérès, and of the compromise solution reached in which Proserpine must each year alternate six months above and below ground. It is not much action on which to base a five-act opera, and indeed Lully’s librettist, the ever-excellent Quinault, adds to it by building up Cérès and her love affair with Jupiter and adding a parallel pair of lovers, Aréthuse and Alphée, with a rival for the latter in Ascalaphe. There is also liberal use of stage effects (including an impulsive role for Mount Etna) which we CD listeners will have to imagine for ourselves. Surprisingly, what it is not padded out with are the kind of extended decorative set-piece sung-and-danced divertissements that form such a large part of Lully’s earlier operas. The insert-notes tell us that Proserpine marks the start of a new phase in the composer’s operas, one which “developed the strictly musical aspect of his operas”, and one supposes that its tightened focus on action and dialogue is part of that.

So too, presumably, is its sense of flow; the opera is a flexible mixture of arioso, dance and chorus, and Niquet clearly enjoys the task of joining its separate elements into a coherent whole. Perhaps in doing so he can be a little hasty with its conversational element, but the way he steers the music around its corners with no bumps and awkward corners betokens considerable musical and dramatic involvement. And as ever he is capable of generating an almost visceral excitement and urgency, not just in Lully’s glorious and imaginative choral writing but in the sensual urgency of his orchestral textures. The all-French-speaking cast does not contain stars but makes strong and convincing contributions throughout, with Salomé Haller, Stéphanie d’Oustrac, Blandine Staskiewicz and Cyril Auvity giving special pleasure. Indeed, this is a model “company” reading, one in which everyone performs as if it really matters.