Colour & imagination: Rameau’s Pigmalion plus music from Les Boréades, Early Opera Company at Temple Music

Rameau: Suite from Les Boréades, Pigmalion; Samuel Boden, Rachel Redmond, Jessica Cale, Lauren Lodge Campbell, Early Opera Company, Christian Curnyn; Temple Music at Middle Temple Hall
Reviewed 20 May 2025

An evening of Rameau in miniature; dances from his final opera and his best one-act opera in performances that brought out the sheer variety, colour and imagination in the music

Rameau’s acte de ballet, Pigmalion, is one of the best of his one-act pieces and provides a nicely digestible sample of the composer’s dramatic output without needing the full panoply of a five-act tragédie en musique. Rameau’s operas are still frustratingly rare on the British operatic stage so it was a delight that Christian Curnyn and his Early Opera Company joined forces with Temple Music to present Rameau’s Pigamalion and a suite of dances from Les Boréades at Middle Temple Hall. Pigmalion featured Samuel Boden as Pigmalion with Rachel Redmond as L’Amour, Jessica Cale as Céphise and Lauren Lodge Campbell as the statue.

We began with a suite of dances from Les Boréades, Rameau’s final, unperformed opera. The work has developed something of a modern performance history, John Eliot Gardiner gave it in concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1975 and conducted a staging at Aix-en-Provence in 1982, but full stagings remain relatively rare. 

The opera concerns the Boréades, the descendants of the North Wind, Boréas. This means that the dance elements included the wonderful Entr’acte, Suite des Vents with its imaginative conjuring of the wind using flutes and drums with vivid urgency. But it was the horns that you noticed, these were up front from the beginning of the vigorous overture, strong almost rasping at times and adding a robust feel that contrasted with Rameau’s more sophisticated writing. Throughout, you noticed the composer’s love of contrast, his use of blocks of colour and timbre, the way vigour gave way to graciousness and elegance. The penultimate movement was one of those classic Rameau slow movements, tender and moving, but we ended with a pair of robust Contredanses that blew the mood with gusto throwing piccolos, horns and a tambourine into the mix.

This was a performance that was both delightful and frustratingly tantalising. It was a real treat to get 30 minutes of vividly imaginative dance music from the opera, and frustrating that we could not hear the full thing.

Les Boréades dated from 1763, but Pigmalion was written rather earlier, in 1748, supposedly to help out the Opera’s management during a crisis. It proved popular with over 200 performances during the 18th century. It is compact, with the focus on the sculptor Pigmalion (Samuel Boden). He opens with an invocation to L’Amour because he has fallen in love with his statue. His girlfriend, Céphise (Jessica Cale) is less than pleased, but after Pigmalion addresses the statue again, it comes to life, courtesy of L’Amour (Rachel Redmond). The statue (Lauren Lodge Campbell) has a brief scene of confusion before avowing her love for Pigmalion though the opera does not give them any sort of rapturous duet. Instead we end with L’Amour and the chorus, and a hymn to L’Amour from Pigmalion. Oh, and plenty of dancing!

It works because it is more focused than some of Rameau’s larger operas with their diverse casts. The mix of plot, singing and dancing is reminiscent of works like Les Indes Galantes with separate plots in each act. We benefitted here from the care that Curnyn brought to all aspects of the music so that the statue’s coming to life was ravishing whilst the dances were infectiously full of colour.

Samuel Boden made a light voiced, stylish Pigmalion, making his rather self-absorbed character elegant. There were moments were I thought perhaps his voice was too light for the strongly coloured orchestra but it carried and the ease and elegance of his very top register were lovely. Jessica Cale made Céphise delightfully tart, creating a neat cameo from a rather small role. Lauren Lodge Campbell was touching as the statue though in a staging she would have danced as well, thus changing the role. Rachel Redmond made L’Amour delightfully self-satisfied. The small chorus had little to do, but did it wonderfully.

This was an evening where the richness and imagination of Rameau’s instrumental writing were to the fore and you sensed the sheer delight of the players in the vivid variety of the music.