Regular collaborators Philippe Jaroussky and Christina Pluhar join forces again for a French Baroque entertainment exploring airs de cour and instrumental pieces from the early 17th century such as would have been variously heard at the courts of Henri IV, his successor Louis XIII and the latter’s ambitious brother Gaston d’Orléans (commonly known as ‘Monsieur’), as well as the aristocratic salons précieux that were fashionable in Paris at the time – an unfamiliar if often attractive repertory that later informed the grander musical vocabularies of Lully and eventually Rameau.

The madness (‘Follie’) of the title is the madness of love, and the programme follows a carefully plotted emotional trajectory that begins with the carpe diem breeziness of Pierre Guédron’s ‘Aux plaisirs, aux délices, bergères’, then gradually turns melancholic when love is spurned and desire remains unfulfilled. The slowly unwinding passacaglias of Étienne Moulinié’s ‘Paisible et ténébreuse nuit’ and Michel Lambert’s ‘Ma bergère est tendre et fidèle’ hint at erotic obsession, while strophic songs such as Antoine Boësset’s glorious ‘Nos esprits libres et contents’ advocate hunting and dancing as pleasurable distractions at times of amatory distress. Towards the end the mood becomes contemplative: Moulinié’s ‘Concert de différents oyseaux’ hints at the Platonic concept of desire affording access to the divine, before the album closes with ‘Enfin la beauté que j’adore’, another of Moulinié’s airs, quietly anticipating reunion and eventual contentment after the sorrows of separation.

Pluhar has arranged roughly half the material herself and there’s plenty of the familiar L’Arpeggiata exhilaration in the faster numbers, as theorbo, harp, guitar and percussion propel the music excitedly forwards and cornetto (Doron Sherwin) and violin (Jesús Merino Ruiz) turn ritornellos into virtuoso riffs. Elsewhere, ravishing theorbo solos accompany Jaroussky’s more reflective utterances, while some of the instrumental pieces are notably striking: the restrained intensity of Rodney Prada’s viola da gamba, for instance, in Louis de Caix d’Hervelois’s Plainte, near the disc’s close, is particularly affecting and exquisite.

Jaroussky, meanwhile, is in many ways in his element in this repertory, and as so often can be utterly captivating, though his androgynous tone now lacks some of its former sweetness and Boësset’s high-lying ‘À la fin de cette bergère’ exposes an occasional hardness in his upper registers under pressure. He’s at his most beguiling in moments of quiet reflection such as ‘Paisible et ténébreuse nuit’, where Moulinié’s long lines unfurl with an almost drowsy sensuousness. He brings bracing wit to Gabriel Bataille’s ‘El baxel está en la playa’, one of several songs in Spanish here. And the rueful self-mockery of ‘Nos esprits libres et contents’ is delightful: hunting, we realise, won’t distract this lover for long. It’s a lovely album in many ways, often very beautiful and always fascinating.