This production is a delight throughout…Haïm retains control by preparing both the scores and the sopranos’ ornaments, her vision giving this carefully wrought performance a fiery intensity, as if recorded live in concert…Desandre, a superb vocal actress, delivers bold musical rhetoric…You might think you know these cantatas, but this is a performance to make you think again

Both singers have unblemished voices of beautiful quality: Sabine Devieilhe, as Aminta, pellucid and free-soaring, Lea Desandre with a dark flare in her high mezzo…Le Concert d’Astrée, under Emmanuelle Haïm’s animating direction, are far more than mere accompanists…Playing with words as well as tones, the crucial cello continuo is always acutely alive to singers and text…A disc that even amid fierce competition is a Handelian winner.

Devieilhe’s agile, glittering high soprano is a known quantity (and she’s certainly on marvellous form here, pinging out high C sharps with aplomb), but the real discovery of this gorgeous album for me was Léa Desandre, whose cool yet sensual mezzo put me very much in mind of the young Magdalena Kožená; the two combine to delicious effect in a gently erotic account of the pastoral cantata Aminta e Fillide.