Day 68
Rameau La Princesse de Navarre
Soloists
English Bach Festival Singers and Baroque Orchestra
Nicholas McGegan
Rameau has been perhaps the greatest musical revelation to me as my musical tastes have developed. We did of course cover him during the undergraduate course but I distinctly remember finding nothing at all in his music. More than that I found that on paper his music looked extremely fussy with all of those ornaments and also seemed very broken up with lots of small sections rather than either full arias with recitative or continuous musical flow. Indeed I remember that one of my lecturers telling me about how they had a little more money for the library than they thought - those were the days! and that were going to spend it on the complete Rameau edition - what a waste of money I thought (though perhaps mercifully I didn’t say it out loud).
Like my rediscovery of Handel (day 25) it was an extract on a sampler CD which prompted me to explore Rameau. The piece was Entrée de Polymnie from Les Boréades. That opened my ears to a completely new sound world which I then started to explore, to the extent that I have regularly purchased every new Rameau opera that has appeared on CD. The range of this music is astonishing. Lively and rhythmic dance music, exciting orchestral evocations of nature, ravishingly beautiful choral music and moments of great solemnity and laugh out loud humour. There really is everything in this music.
The Aesthetic of these operas is so far removed from what we expect from opera nowadays that it is difficult to find the right approach to staging them. The dance music is the biggest problem. This is not like 19th century French Opera where there are whole ballet sections which can simply be cut if required. Here the dance is integrated into the musical fabric and it would be impossible - and of course given the quality of the dance music utterly mad - to remove it. The Castor and Pollux I saw a few years ago at ENO simply played the dance music without any dancing - I don’t think that worked. Some of the more imaginative approaches on DVD find ways of making the works come alive.
I didn’t think that I was going to be able cover Rameau in this series as I thought that I had heard all of the operas which have been recorded. But this one was issued a long time ago and has been out of print for ages, but I did manage to track down a second hand copy. It is not strictly an opera, more a series of interludes and entertainments incorporated into a very long play by Voltaire written for a royal engagement. It was very much a one-off piece and Rameau used some of the material again in other words. There was lots to enjoy here - particularly the dance music - Rameau must rank with Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky as one of the great masters of ballet. And for a bassoon player like me Rameau’s use of the instrument is always highly inventive - I’d love to play one of these operas. I don’t suppose that I ever will, but I did have the pleasure a few years ago of conducting a short suite that I had put together of pieces from several of his operas, including - to go round full circle - the entree which started me off on my voyage of discovery
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