Piau negotiates with true French panache both the vocal and emotional highs and lows. Her voice is as sensual as Piaf, poetic as Greco, and with a chameleon-like sensitivity to the dramatic context. There's volatile playing, too, from Les Paladins

she brings her familiar pellucid, subtly varied tone and scintillating coloratura technique, together with a mastery of French declamation that tends to elude non-native speakers...As ever, Piau makes reams of routine-looking coloratura dramatically specific rather than an excuse for upmarket showing off.

A cross-section of arias is presented, from the florid and flamboyant to the consoling and caressing. Sandrine Piau exhibits no signs of difficulty in the ascending and descending of the vocal ladders...the vocal hurdles are fearlessly surmounted by the soprano, her bright but not piercing tone glittering through the fioritura.

Delivered with that rapturous, floating tone that makes her so special. Jérôme Correas and Les Paladins are fabulous in this repertory, and there are some lovely dances by Rameau woven in between the arias. Beautiful stuff that leaves you wanting more

There are some unexpected treasures unearthed here, but Piau's gifts are nowhere more effectively employed than on Lully's “Enfin, j'ai dissipé la crainte”. She animates the narrative with a measured emotional turbulence that stretches the boundaries of its formal arrangement, a tension between propriety and hysteria resolved only in the poise of the final bars.