What is it that makes French baroque music so unmistakable? You only have to listen to a minute or two of this disc to recognise its nationality, even if guessing the composer is more difficult. Perhaps it's the instrumental colour, as many-hued as the finest embroidered cloth, perhaps it's the juxtaposition of the most stately overtures--full of brass flourishes and dignified pomp--with the liveliest dance movements. Indeed, so French is this music in style, that it's of little consequence that Lully was actually Italian-born (though French trained). These three suites were all composed for the court of Louis XIV, a great patron of the arts and in his time an enthusiastic dancer. Le divertissement royal is as gilded and magnificently over-the-top as the Versailles festivities it was designed to celebrate (just sample the magnificent trumpets in track 11) while Le bourgeois gentilhomme, was Lully's most spectacular collaboration with Molière in a form that combined music and drama (sample the Turkish ceremony in track 4 or track 8, a ceremonial and gracious end to the suite). The suite from the opera Alceste makes a fittingly rich finale, ranging wide from the dramatic possibilities of "Echos" (track 23) to the overcast "La pompe funèbre". The playing from Jordi Savall and his band is terrific: vivid, perfectly drilled and endlessly responsive to the theatrical possibilities of this effervescent music, a feature brought to the fore by the excellent recording. --Harriet Smith