The Unedited Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus. By Carolina Maria de Jesus

Les Pêcheurs de Perles is best known for its glorious duet, but Georges Bizet’s opera has much more to offer. This live recording more than ever brings out the brilliance of this oriental story about love, duty and friendship. In the last 150 years, Bizet’s piece has mainly been heard in editions that stray from the composer’s original composition. This album – on the contrary - offers the first recording in history of the 1863 premiere version, reconstructed and published by Bärenreiter in 2015. Les Pêcheurs de perles contains a quintessentially French blend of lyricism, exoticism and drama, and the four soloists (Julie Fuchs as Leïla, Cyrille Dubois as Nadir, Florian Sempey as Zurga and Luc Bertin-Hugault as Nourabad) belong to today’s best performers for this specialist repertoire.

This release was originally part of a two-disc album of vocal and instrumental pieces by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre issued in 1986. The music by this gifted contemporary of François Couperin is enjoying a renaissance, and justifiably, for it is inventive and affecting. Sopranos Isabelle Poulenard and Sophie Boulin are fluent in the somewhat rarefied idiom of the 'cantate française' and the result is delicately pleasing. Four of the cantatas on the disc are taken from Jacquet's first collection of Cantates françaises sur des sujets tirés de l'écriture, published in 1708, and dedicated to Louis XIV. The fifth work, Jephté, comes from a second collection issued in 1711 and is distinct from the other cantatas on the disc in being written for two voices rather than one.

This collection of English verse anthems and viol fantasias – there are no examples of the a cappella, highly polyphonic full anthem – comes from Montreal's vibrant early music scene and it offers a fresh version of these often-recorded classics of English choral music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The verse anthem, written in English, was a characteristic Anglican genre, alternating between choral and solo passages and deploying the text across plain but often rather fervent lines of music. It is accompanied here, as was normal, by viols; an organ can also be used. Done right, a work like John Ward's Prayer is an endless chain (track 2) or any of the three thorny but exultant anthems by Orlando Gibbons should have the combination of piety and rich beauty that would be characteristic of Bach's music a century or more later.