With their quaint names, and their quirky conductors, the French baroque orchestras that in recent years have altered our sense of musical history are a little like cults, led by wild-eyed, self-willed visionaries. Emmanuelle Haïm, who conducts Le Concert d'Astrée, has the unruly hair and waving arms of a prophetess in full flight. William Christie, the founder of Les Arts Florissants, is a chilly and disciplinary high priest, while Mark Minkowski, presiding over Les Musiciens du Louvre, is more like a flushed, sybaritic abbott. But Christophe Rousset, the harpsichord virtuoso who in 1991 formed Les Talens Lyriques, looked to begin with like an elfin choirboy – in the days when he had a centaur's goatee – like a disruptive pagan.

Now over 50, Rousset has shed the goatee but kept the wicked grin that went with it. He is – as we are to be reminded this year by several appearances at the Wigmore Hall and a visit to the Barbican – the most versatile and musicologically curious of the baroque revivalists, who has recently been hovering on the verge of romanticism. I met him last week in Vienna, where he was starting a tour of the opera Las Danaides by Salieri, reputedly the poisoner of Mozart – a drama about a mythological massacre that replaces the nimble courtly elegance of the baroque with a rage wild enough for Beethoven. Although tragedy in the 18th century was usually averted by divine intervention, Les Danaides has the courage to end in despair, with the 50 daughters of Danaus, 49 of whom have followed his orders to slaughter their husbands on their wedding night, moaning in hell as demons torture them.

After dipping his toe in storm and stress, Rousset is due to return to the jaunty hedonism of the baroque. The first of his Wigmore Hall concerts concentrates on Couperin and the musical politics of Versailles, and next April he will be conducting arias composed for the castrato Farinelli, impersonated by the freakishly agile Swedish mezzo Ann Hallenberg. His Barbican offering in March is Rameau's Les Indes Galantes, a series of "short stories" (in Rousset's description) about the pleasure of love in tropical climes, punctuated by an erupting volcano and concluding with a druggy dance of American Indians high on the fumes of a peace pipe.

"There is such joy in this music," Rousset said. "The rhythms are what appeals, because everything derives from dance, and the colours – the way Rameau uses the flutes and oboes and violas – are so enchanting. It is about the pleasure of living in that 18th-century world where life was about the pursuit of happiness and God smiled on all human activities. It all ended very soon. At the French Revolution they closed the churches, guillotined all the monks and nuns, and God didn't react: from now on, man was lost in the universe, like the wanderer in the mists in the painting by Caspar David Friedrich."

How far, I wondered, does Rousset's cultural nostalgia go? Can we admire the music of Louis XIV's court without buying into the absolutism, the cult of la gloire, and the fawning over military victories? He often performs in the opera house at Versailles, constructed in wood made to imitate marble in the 1760s: would he, I asked, have enjoyed being a court musician? "No, no, that would be awful: they were servants, not free at all! Though of course it is getting to be like that again, with the state making demands before you qualify for subsidies and private sponsors behaving sometimes like the new princes. But not the sponsors of Les Talens Lyriques, of course!"

The baroque revival began 30 years ago with productions by Les Arts Florissants of Lully's Atys and Charpentier's Médée which reconstructed a court theatre, with flimsy painted skies and bewigged singers. Although he studied archaeology before diverging into music, Rousset favours fidelity to period practice in his orchestra but aggressive modernisation on stage. Hence the updating of the two Rameau operas he will conduct in 2014, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the crotchety, wayward composer's death. Platée, about Jove wooing a frog, is set in the 1950s, with a pink Cadillac among its props. "Platée wants to be a star," said Rousset, "so she belongs in that period, when celebrity was starting to be something like the mythological system of the Greeks. And for Les Indes Galantes I asked for something hard and political, even cynical – a production that doesn't just enjoy exoticism the way sex tourists do but looks at what these remote places are like now." The Turkish episode is therefore about human trafficking, the Peruvian act concerns the drug trade, and the American forest is ravaged by capitalists cannibalising natural resources. It all begins, however, in unspoiled Eden, with a polymorphous romp of naked singers and dancers. It's a shame, I said, that the Barbican can't afford to import Laura Scozzi's production, so that we will have to make do with a chaste, clothed concert version. "Well then, come and see it in Bordeaux in February," replied Rousset. "You will have excellent wine – and all that nudity!"

Despite the fervour of his campaign on Rameau's behalf, Rousset doubts that his stage works – combinations of opera and ballet, requiring exorbitant resources – will ever be as popular as Handel's operas have recently become. "It is all so complex, sometimes dissonant, meant for connoisseurs. But Rameau was a great genius – more a scientist than a musician, perhaps, because he spent decades writing a treatise on harmony that is still used in schools, and only began composing after the age of 50. At the end of his life, he regretted that his compositions had used up time he might have spent on theorising! The theory was important because it was global, connected to the whole universe: he was trying to formulate a system that held everything together, like the music of the spheres."

Rousset took the name of his band, Les Talens Lyriques, from Rameau's pastoral frolic Les Fêtes d'Hébé, which shows off three lyrical talents that are, in order of importance, poetry, music, and dance. In French culture, words always have priority, to which music defers. "Yes," said Rousset, "that is the difference between French style and Italian, which everyone argued about in the 18th century. Lully was born in Florence, but, when he settled in France to organise Louis XIV's musical entertainments, he went to the theatre at the Hôtel de Bourgogne and annotated the way the actors spoke so that he could get the singers in his operas to match their declamation and their diction. You can hear the difference even in Salieri: when he's composing for Italy he lets the melodies run away with him, but in Les Danaides, with its French libretto, he doesn't allow any bel canto. What matters is the flavour of the words themselves, not words as an excuse for musical display."

Rousset's opening Wigmore Hall programme touches on this national polemic: it includes Couperin's Apotheoses of Lully and Corelli, harpsichord homages that dramatise the contrast between the equitable, articulate Lully and the divine frenzy or Italianate enthusiasm of the violinist Corelli, who was known as the Bolognese archangel. A subterranean rumble on the keyboard even represents the grumbling resentment of Corelli's rivals and their stamping tantrum when he is promoted to Parnassus. Then as now, music was apparently a cut-throat, competitive business. Finally, as always in the 18th century, a god descends to make peace: Apollo flies in to advise that a merger of Lully and Corelli, of grace and passion, would be perfection in music. "That's the joke," said Rousset. "Couperin is presenting himself as the ideal combination of the two schools, so the piece really is his own apotheosis! Very cheeky, but irresistible."

Why, I asked, did Corelli so arouse the self-controlled French? Rousset began by talking about his "classic harmonies", which he likened, a little vaguely, to the structure of St Peter's in Rome. Then, warming to the task, he sat himself at an imaginary harpsichord – all that his dressing room at the Theater an der Wien could offer was a bulky grand piano, swathed in a dust cloth – and, as if playing an air guitar, put himself through Couperin's mimicry of Corelli's string figurations.

"It was Rameau who invented the alternating fingers," he said, with his digits jabbing and darting. "But already in Couperin the complexity is fantastic: you have two or three lines and the hands go back and forth." He could not talk about it without doing it: his hands twisted in a frenetic dance, which – if there had been a suitable instrument in the room – would have set the mind on fire.

"You see," he said when the silent concert ended, "the hands make love!" At the Barbican, there will be no bare bottoms in Les Indes Galantes, but at the Wigmore Hall you will be able to both watch and hear a manual orgy.

• Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques perform at Wigmore Hall, London W1, on 6 December, 30 March, 16 and 28 April, including a Hommage to Farinelli. Rousset directs Rameau's Les Indes Galantes at the Barbican, London EC2, on 6 March.