Offenbach composed over 100 works for the stage, only a few of which have been recorded complete. This groundbreaking set offers 41 extracts from two dozen comic operas from the master of irony and melody, ranging from the early Une nuit blanche – which was on the bill at the opening night of Les Bouffes Parisiens in 1855 – to elaborate spectacles such as Les bergers, an essay in time travel from ancient Greece to modern France, Vert-Vert, which features a dead parrot, and Le voyage dans la lune, in which the Moonfolk catch that dirty disease from Earth – love.

Offenbach tailored all his operas to particular performers, and it is a challenge to modern singers to find their own way of suggesting the outsize personalities of such stars as Hortense Schneider and Zulmar Bouffar. Colin Lee is splendid in an aria written for Étienne Pradeau in La rose de Saint-Flour, in which a stuttering coppersmith brings a cooking-pot as a gift to his beloved. Yvonne Kenny and Alexandra Sherman offer the contrasting personalities of the two heroines of La créole, while Jennifer Larmore takes on the shade of Schneider in La diva, with an outrageous parody of the Act 2 finale of La traviata. From Geneviève de Brabant comes a nifty little rondo about a pâté, sung by Cassandre Berthon, and Offenbach’s first opera based on a story by ETA Hoffmann, Le roi carotte, gives us a “Ronde de chemins de fer”, one of the earliest operatic train journeys. Le fifre enchanté has a giddy coloratura marching song which Laura Claycomb negotiates with panache. Even from the extracts it’s easy to gauge the thin line Offenbach and his librettists were treading vis-à-vis the censors with works like La jolie parfumeuse (hear Mark Stone sing “Pardieu!”), Les Braconniers – Diana Montague in a typical Bouffar moment celebrating her lover’s “grosse frimousse” – and L’île de Tulipatan, a satire on the folly of emperors, as Loïc Félix as King Cacatois sings about gossip columns. All but dedicated misanthropes will find this set entrancing; highly recommended.