First performed at the Opéra-Comique in 1893, Phryné comes immediately after Saint-Saëns’s big stage works of the late 1870s and ’80s – Étienne Marcel, Henry VIII, Ascanio – with which he sought to re-establish French grand opéra as a counter to the growing Wagnerism that he distrusted. And it couldn’t, in fact, be more different. Notably compact, with just over an hour’s music, it’s a delicious little erotic comedy and from start to finish you get a sense of the composer finally letting his hair down after tackling the weighty seriousness of its predecessors.

The subject was more familiar at the time than it is now. Phryne was a courtesan in classical Athens, whose beauty inspired Praxiteles’ much copied statue of Aphrodite and who, according to legend, was famously acquitted of charges of impiety by the Areopagus, the Athenian high court, when her defence lawyer pulled off her tunic, exposing her body to an awestruck assembled tribunal. Nineteenth-century France very much regarded her as a femme fatale. Baudelaire was unsurprisingly fascinated, and Gérôme’s painting Phryné devant l’Aréopage, reproduced in Bru Zane’s accompanying book, caused a stir when first exhibited in 1861.

The libretto, by Lucien Augé de Lassus, plays fast and loose with some of this material, placing it at the service of a narrative which, whether by accident or design, curiously echoes Don Pasquale. Phryné has a spendthrift lover named Nicias, of whom she is fond, but whose uncle, the elderly magistrate Dicéphile, is at once a skinflint and hypocrite, who disinherits his nephew and publicly disapproves of Phryné yet secretly desires her. Saint-Saëns’s humour, however, is less abrasive than Donizetti’s since the old man’s true feelings for Phryné are eventually expressed in music of deeply felt wonder and sincerity.

Elsewhere, the tone is light and the stylistic range wide. Some critics at the time considered it an operetta, doubtless thinking of La belle Hélène as an obvious predecessor, and there are certainly overt echoes of Offenbach in both act finales. Dicéphile in curmudgeonly mood gets mock-Baroque music complete with a pompous bassoon obbligato, while Phryné is given a ravishing aria about being compared to Venus rising from the waves. Not all of it is actually Saint-Saëns’s own work: he entrusted the orchestration of the first act to Messager, who also replaced the original dialogue with recitatives for the 1896 Italian premiere, and it is the latter version that is used for this fine new recording.

Hervé Niquet conducts with considerable elegance and panache. There’s plenty of clear yet sensuous detail in the Rouen orchestra’s playing, and the choral singing, from Niquet’s own Concert Spirituel choir, is first rate. The title-role is tricky. Saint-Saëns intended it for Emma Calvé, a noted Carmen, though the Opéra-Comique management insisted on Sibyl Sanderson, later the creator of Thaïs, for whom Saint-Saëns added some vertiginous coloratura, which was her speciality. Florie Valiquette’s voice is sweet rather than overtly sensual but she has a nice line in discreet innuendo, and that coloratura is effortless, seductive and exactingly precise. Cyrille Dubois, in another high-lying role, is her stylish Nicias, silky toned and – rightly – a bit vapid, while Thomas Dolié as his uncle is by turns funny and touching, though he sounds fractionally young. Anaïs Constans, in the trouser role of the servant Lampito, does fine things with her song describing Phryné’s boudoir, one of the best and most suggestive numbers in the score, while François Rougier and Patrick Bolleire do much with little as Dicéphile’s two bickering sidekicks. Very enjoyable and beautifully done.