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Dalida was one of the most important female singers in the history of French music, yet she is hardly known in Britain or America. Her career spanned 32 years from 1956 to 1987, when she committed suicide. She recorded for the Barclay label until 1970, when she moved to her brother's label, Orlando. This collection contains (as far as I know) every song she recorded for Barclay in it's original form (no remixes here). Another massive boxed set is available covering all her Orlando recordings. The CD's that make up the two boxed sets were all made available separately.

With Jean-Baptiste Stuck's Polydore, Gyorgy Vashegyi's directing talents alight once again on a French opera from the era between Lully and Rameau. Whist Louis XIV's reign was gradually drawing to a close, his nephew, duke Philippe d'Orleans - due to become regent for Louis XV on the death of the child's great-grandfather, the Sun King - was greatly expanding his own court cultural activities (within which he had a pronounced predilection for Italian music). The Tuscany-born, later-naturalized Frenchman, Giovanni Battista Stuck was a beneficiary of ducal and regental munificence and, given that taste for opera continued at full tilt in Paris after Louis XIV's death in 1715, Stuck was well-placed to prove his worth. His most highly regarded opera is Polydore, a 1720 tragedie en musique with a libretto confected by Simon-Joseph Pellegrin: a mythological tale of Greeks, Thracians and Trojans, interweaving war, family and love, with tragedy brewing up throughout the work.

If today no one questions the greatness of Mozart, the most famous composer in Europe at the end of the 18th century was probably Antonio Salieri. For many years court composer of the Austrian Emperor, Salieri wrote an enormous amount of music, some of the best of which remains that composed for the theatre. Les Danaïdes was premièred at Paris’s Opéra on 26th April 1784 and met with a triumphant success. The present recording, qualitatively very high also from a technical point of view, dates from 1983 and features an extraordinary Montserrat Caballé in great vocal form. Gianluigi Gelmetti conducts the renowned RAI Orchestra.

Following on the international success of their recording of Lully's Bellerophon, Christophe Rousset and his ensemble Les Talens Lyriques present Hercule mourant (Hercules Dying) - an undiscovered operatic treasure by Antoine Dauvergne. When Francoeur and Rebel took over as directors of the Academie Royale de Musique (the Paris Opéra) in 1757, they decided to promote some of the new generation of composers. Among them was Dauvergne, who appears to have enjoyed great favor at that time. Premiered in 1762, Hercule mourant was a success, receiving eighteen performances.

The remarkable Hypermnestre by Charles-Hubert Gervais is the latest unremembered early 18th-century French opera to be recorded afresh for Glossa, and conducted by György Vashegyi.