The fashionable literary salons of Paris were centres of experimentation in the refined art of conversation that expressed an idealised vision of love as well as a most poetic depiction of aristocratic society. The women who founded these salons, such as the Marquise de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry, exerted a considerable influence on social culture and its fashion for préciosité, creating a poetic style whose inevitably plaintive accents would swiftly lead lovers who frequented such salons down the winding paths of the pays de Tendre. “The true character of those who love is composed of tenderness and plaintiveness,” according to Abbé Charles Cotin — and music was employed as a means of expressing every nuance of amorous feeling that many poets of the style galant took great pains to depict. The musicians who were most in vogue would then take their galant verses and set them to song in the form of airs sérieux, a genre which dominated all secular French music for most of the reign of Louis XIV. This album, a world premiere recording, is devoted to the airs sérieux of Joseph Chabanceau de La Barre, a scion of one of the most prestigious families of French musicians of the 17th century.