Heaven and hell | 5 November 2011

Rameau is the great baroque master who has yet to be properly rediscovered, at any rate in the UK. It isn’t easy to see why, when one contemplates the Handel-mania that has been sweeping the land for the past quarter-century. Rameau is at least as melodically fertile, his scoring is extraordinary and often extraordinarily lovely, and his plots are far easier to grasp. And while Handel’s operas grind to a dramatic halt every few minutes for an extended expression of feeling, and there is only rarely the sense of interaction between characters, with Rameau we have that sense constantly.

The main trouble, I think, certainly the main trouble for me, is the fairly frequent intrusion of dance sequences, which can drain the urgency from the action with lethal efficiency. Besides that, there is the question of what kind of dance to perform. Indeed, there is the question of what style to perform the whole works in.