Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Rameau: Castor et Pollux

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) should rank alongside Bach and Handel as their equal and a true musical genius of the eighteenth century. He is surely the greatest composer of the French baroque. I have broadcast as many recordings of his operas as I could find. Although he began writing for the lyric stage in France at the advanced age of fifty, his output of tragedies lyriques, ballet divertissements, etc. was prolific right to the very end of his long life. He had a background as a musical theorist. He wrote a famous treatise on harmony. He is also credited with discovering overtones. Rameau marked the path leading to the modern science of acoustics. As a composer he was a musical progressive stylistically advanced beyond his colleagues, Bach and Handel.

Central to Rameau's operatic output is the tragedie en musique in five acts Castor et Pollux (1737). Twice in years long past I have broadcast the 1972 Telefunken recording of the original 1737 version of the lyric tragedy, first on LPs (Sunday, June 12, 1988) and again in the 1987 CD reissue (Sunday, November 8, 1992). That pioneer in baroque "period" performance practice, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, was directing the period instrument ensemble he founded, the Concentus Musicus Wien and the Stockholm Chamber Choir.

Rameau radically reworked his score for Castor et Pollux for its 1754 staged revival. He cut the lengthy prologue altogether. It was by then a royal courtly holdover from the Lullian past, no longer relevant in the public theaters of Paris. He provided a completely new first act and upgraded the rest of the music into an even more progressive mode. Along came a Naxos release in 2004 of the 1754 Castor et Pollux, with Kevin Mallon leading a Canadian period instrumental group, the Aradia Ensemble. The 1754 version went over the air on Sunday, May 22, 2005.

And now a new recording of the 1754 version has appeared, made live in broadcast performance over Radio France Montpelier in 2014. (The two previous recordings were done in studio.) Raphael Pichon directs the orchestra and chorus of Pygmalion. Harmonia Mundi of France released Castor et Pollux this year on two compact discs.