Despite containing what is probably Rameau’s best known single piece of music (the keyboard piece Les Sauvages, arranged as the vocal ensemble ‘Forêts paisibles’) this is claimed to be the first fully staged performance in the UK of Les Indes galantes. Its hybrid of opera and ballet is well served in this collaboration between Leonardo García-Alarcón’s Cappella Mediterranea and the dance troupe Structure Rualité, under Bintou Dembele’s direction. For once the overused term immersive is apt here: music and choreography are integrated with the orchestra spread out on the stage (not unseen in the pit below) in a darkened atmosphere that looks as though it is the setting for a cabaret or night club. In the shadows of dawn and from within the audience, Ana Quintans’s clarion call as Hébé in the Prologue urges the assembled group of musicians and dancers on stage to take part in a festival celebrating love, to which the chorus (the Chœur de Chambre de Namur) respond cheerfully, also from the auditorium. When Bellone appears, exhorting the company to the glory of battle instead, Cupid (Amour) leads an alternative enterprise to more distant places and peoples where love is preferred, and various amorous episodes are then played out in contexts where romance might be threatened, but wins out.
The representation of Europeans’ encounters with those settings (the Ottoman Empire, the Incas of Peru, Persia, and the ‘Savages’ or Native Americans) is now sometimes deemed to be a problematic legacy of colonialism and empire as, perhaps, condescending and misunderstood descriptions of those ‘exotic’ and mysterious cultures – even though those tentative portrayals were part of the European Enlightenment’s self-reflective discourse on analysing its shortcomings and artificial values. Those foreign settings are not evoked directly here, but something of the indigenous culture of those countries on the other side of that encounter with Europe (sometimes grouped together now as the socio-economic entity the ‘Global South’) is brought to the fore here in the hip hop-inspired dance choreography (blending African and American traditions) provided by Structure Rualité. That represents a very different aesthetic from the usually genteel forms of Baroque dances that Rameau envisaged in his original work, but the new dance sequences invigorate its scenario with more contemporary resonances. They reach a furious buzz of elemental energy in ‘Forêts paisibles’ near the end of the whole work, where the tension they generate is released in Rameau’s triumphant concluding chaconne. That forceful activity symmetrically parallels the volcanic eruptions which the jealous lover Huascar engineers in the Peruvian Entrée (simulated here with garish lighting) just before the interval.
Structure Rualité’s choreography and the fact that the same four vocal soloists appear in a similar modern, urban sartorial guise for all five sections of the ‘opera-ballet’ lend the performance a helpful semblance of continuity and connection, which those varied courses otherwise don’t particularly establish. Some cuts to the score make for a more succinct succession of dramatic incidents, especially in the Persian third Entrée which only retains a few of its principal airs and largely ignores its scenario, before proceeding swiftly with the final Entrée.
Accomplished performances from the singers also provide distinctive threads of musical continuity. Quintans is identifiable by her agreeably exacting tone cutting over and through Rameau’s often sensuous textures, while Laurène Paternò tends towards a creamier, richer timbre, and is lighter in tone, complementing the flute solo of her air ‘Viens, Hymen, viens m’unir au Vainqueur que j’adore’ as Phani, in antiphonal dialogue with each other across the auditorium from its highest tier. She rises to an excited register of virtuosity at the climax of the last Entrée as Zima. Alasdair Kent has an agile, soft-grained approach to the tenor roles, though not quite the true ethereality and higher pitch of a true haute-contre. Andrew Wolf affords effective contrast as the lower of the two male voices with assured, sonorous accounts of the baritone parts, except that he comes under some pressure in higher notes as Huascar.
García-Alarcón and Cappella Mediterranea underpin the production’s propulsive energy with an exhilarating account of the music. The performance isn’t rushed, but they maintain a dynamic momentum throughout, and draw bolder colours from Rameau’s orchestration than the more rarefied, pastel hues one might associate with such ensembles as Les Arts Florissants or Les Talens Lyriques in this repertoire. The exquisite number ‘Tendre amour’ exemplifies all those qualities – flowing, rather than slow and milking its harmonies and suspensions, with some reedier timbres from the singers and the instruments (the continuo especially with its resonant bass strings and bassoons) offering an attractive astringency. Music and choreography here forge a compelling entity from an operatic narrative that is unpromisingly slight.
The post The Grange Festival 2025 – Rameau’s Les Indes galantes – with Laurène Paternò, Ana Quintans, Alasdair Kent & Andreas Wolf; directed by Bintou Dembélé; conducted by Leonardo García-Alarcón appeared first on The Classical Source.
