Cherubini: Lodoiska.

* French is a far better sung language than German, though it trails Italian and Spanish as guarantors of the open throat, something you will grant when you listen to the Cherubini Lodoiska, as recorded by Riccardo Muti and the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. It is what the French, who are so skillful at labeling, call a piece d sauvetage, a rescue play, recalling that mainstay of America's popular theater and the silent films in which the heroine is rescued at the last moment by the hero or the U.S. Marines. For some reason this appealed to the sans culottes of the French Revolution, who gave Lodoiska a run of two hundred performances.

Cherubini created a stage-set Poland for Lodoiska, with a Tartar sauce of heroes and villains. The libretto is no sillier than some others, and the music is engaging and tuneful, of a quality the composer took with him when he became a kind of court musician during the Second Empire. Riccardo Muti and a group of soloists with well-matched voices romp through the score with good taste and the right degree of respect (Sony, S2K 47290).