The magnificence of the music and dance productions mounted in the monarchical courts of the 17th century is hard to imagine today, let alone reproduce. Indeed, conductor Sébastien Daucé reflects in the giant hardback book accompanying the two CDs here that "I was of course strongly tempted to attempt a literal reconstruction, but the lavish forces and splendour it would demand...made this an impossible prospect." Nevertheless, what you get here is an imaginative representation of one of the most famous musical events of the century, the Concert Royal de la Nuit, the Royal Evening Concert, of February 23, 1653. It was "royal" in two senses: the young Louis XIV, the Sun King, not only witnessed the production but danced in it, as Apollo. The concert was a gigantic event, comprising singing, dancing, programmatic instrumental music, and choral numbers, all of them organized into four "veilles," or watches, four acts that correspond to phenomena and activities of the night like romantic interludes of pastoral characters, sleep, darkness, stars, moon, and planets, sunrise, and so on. Aside from some dance pieces, it is not known what music was used in the production; Daucé's contribution has been to imagine what the music might have been. He brings together pieces by various French composers as well as the Italians Francesco Cavallli and Luigi Rossi, known to have been favored by Louis' eminence grise, Cardinal Mazarin. Everything is knitted together, extraordinarily well, in a way that matches the themes of the production as they are known to have existed. It is difficult to get a feel for the whole by sampling, but try the "Dialogue de Sommeil et du Silence," the Dialogue of Sleep and Silence, by Jean de Cambefort (CD two, track 15), an extraordinarily lovely take on this theme. More important than any of the individual parts is the scope of the whole, which comes closer than anything else thus far to an embodiment of the role music played in the power of the French monarchy. An extraordinary achievement.