Looking good

Rameau’s Les Paladins, which arrived briefly at the Barbican Theatre, was spectacular, amazing. Or rather this production was. It was one of those occasions when so much happens on stage that you can begin to wonder whether there’s something — or nothing — to hide. I had listened to it on Radio Three a few days earlier, and been puzzled by the excitement it seemed to be generating, since most of the music struck me as being well below the best of Rameau. It turned out, at the Barbican, that we were to be happily subjected to a multimedia display, in which the visuals easily dominated. Three-D persons stepped out of two-D metro coaches, people turned into animals and vice versa, a huge array of rabbits nibbled all over the backcloth, singers danced with plausible results, there were plenty of dancers doing acrobatics, and there was singing, too, and a lively musical accompaniment.