Country pleasures

The English weren’t the first cowpat composers. Jean-Philippe Rameau raised the art of frolicking in the fields to such heights he filched pastoralism for the French. Rameau’s mastery of landscape is not just a question of orchestral colour, though that’s a large part of it — those goaty oboes, lowing bassoons, cooing flutes transport you straight to the manger. It’s that the very shape of his music, the softly curved lines that slide into burbling ornamentation, follows the contours of the rolling field and riverbank.

The glory of his opéra-ballet Les Fêtes d’Hébé (1739) is the final act’s woodland romance that unfurls like a sunrise in the sexy Musette. We start the opera, however, with the sounds of the fêtes, the strings streaming down on us like confetti. What exactly did the director hear in these acts of exuberance — musical counterparts to the rococo paintings of Fragonard — to think the music suited an anaemic white set and characterisation communicated through coloured Lycra, comedy swimming caps and trading-floor semaphore?

Had Thomas Lebrun (director, set designer and choreographer) just told the stories — simple little things set up to glorify the art forms that should whirl deliciously around them — it might have shown the audience what a charming piece this is.