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Opera
Country pleasures
Igor Toronyi-Lalic
Les Fêtes d’Hébé
Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music
Academy of Ancient Music/Jordi
Savall
Barbican Hall
Les Talens Lyriques/Christophe
Rousset
Wigmore Hall
The English weren’t the first cowpat com-
posers. Jean-Philippe Rameau raised the art
of frolicking in the fields to such heights he
filched pastoralism for the French. Rameau’s
mastery of landscape is not just a question of
orchestral colour, though that’s a large part
of it — those goaty oboes, lowing bassoons,
cooing flutes transport you straight to the
manger. It’s that the very shape of his music,
the softly curved lines that slide into bur-
bling ornamentation, follows the contours
of the rolling field and riverbank.
The glory of his opéra-ballet Les Fêtes
d’Hébé (1739) is the final act’s woodland
romance that unfurls like a sunrise in the
sexy Musette. We start the opera, howev-
er, with the sounds of the fêtes, the strings
streaming down on us like confetti. What
exactly did the director hear in these acts of
exuberance — musical counterparts to the
rococo paintings of Fragonard — to think
the music suited an anaemic white set and
characterisation communicated through
and a gust of steam transport us from a
hotel lobby to Brief Encounter’s station tea
room (a setting that Bourne — an inveter-
ate recycler — revisits in his Cinderella).
‘Town’s most memorable vignette fea-
tures two men slyly eyeing each other up in
the hotel lounge. The older man (created by
Bourne himself back in 1991) is pure Ratti-
gan in blazer and cravat and his new friend
is primly prodding at his needlepoint. They
seem set fair for farce but their cautiously
coded exchange blossoms into a swoony
duet to Noël Coward’s ‘Dearest Love’, a
lovestruck walk in rhythm with unmistak-
able echoes of the ‘Popular Song’ duet from
Façade (more Ashton).
Other dancemakers have fashioned male
duets (Lloyd Newson, Russell Maliphant et
al) but most degenerate into muscle-bound
shows of strength. Bourne deploys a lifetime
of dance and movie-going to craft a pas de
deux of extraordinary wit and sweetness,
matching the tenderness of Coward’s lyric
(‘I saw your strange elusive smile/ And all
my life was altered’), striking the same note
of understated ecstasy.
coloured Lycra, comedy swimming caps and
trading-floor semaphore?
Had Thomas Lebrun (director, set
designer and choreographer) just told the
stories — simple little things set up to glo-
rify the art forms that should whirl delicious-
ly around them — it might have shown the
audience what a charming piece this is. One
of Rameau’s most immediate hits with the
public, the work had 80 performances in its
first year and several revivals.
The characters are familiar enough.
Feisty bohemians, creative dropouts, sex-
obsessed hippies fight it out with the fustily
divine, semi-divine and regal using only, in
the words of the work’s subtitle, ‘Les Talens
Lyriques’ — their lyrical talents. In essence
it’s X Factor, ancient Greek-style, an egotis-
tical talent contest spread over three acts,
involving representatives from poetry, music
and dance.
In this production, however, the only
contest was a race to the bottom. Anything
you can do, I can do worse, was the motto
of the fumbled relay between eye, ear andlimb. The director, meanwhile, seemed to be
playing pass-the-parcel in reverse: wrapping
and obscuring, wrapping and obscuring. It’s
a French favourite, this version of the game.
Were Lebrun Merce Cunningham, he
might have got away with the abstractions.
But his club-floor geometry, star jumps and
swishy arms was pure Bez. He didn’t even
have the energy to follow through on his wil-
ful non-literalism, projecting stock footage on
to a large screen to indicate that we were in a
Field, or Wood, when he ran out of ideas. Why
is it always the adults who mess things up in
college opera productions? A UK première
(this was the work’s first staged outing here)
surely deserved better.
The Royal College of Music Baroque
Orchestra and the choir Les Chambres,
conducted by Jonathan Williams, were
messy, darkly coloured, vigorous and high-
ly enjoyable. The singing made you real-
ise how hard French baroque opera is to
pull off, the one standout being the clean,
heady voice of Pauline Texier, a confidant,
coquettish Hébé/Églé, who had more cha-
risma in her left eyebrow than the others
put together.
By chance the French outfit Les Tal-
ens Lyriques (named after the opera)
were in town last Sunday. It gave us Ram-
istes another chance to get our fix. A few
weeks before that the Academy of Ancient
Music (AAM), under Spanish viol player
Jordi Savall, was also hawking a Rameau
suite. Both programmed Rameau next to
work by French and German contempo-
raries. It was fascinating — the freshness of
Rameau’s way with rhythm and form, howThose goaty oboes, lowing bassoons,
cooing flutes transport you straight
to the mangerhe squeezes more out of his instruments
than anyone else.
The AAM at the Barbican breathed
humanity and warmth into his windy, wood-
land farewell, Les Boréades, written at the
age of 79. The gem here is the ‘Entrée de
Polymnie’, Rameau at his bittersweet best,
the gentle tumbling of bassoon and strings
interrupted by a crumbly middle. Heaven. As
always with Rameau, the ornamentation is
never there to dazzle, as in Italian opera, but
instead to destabilise sound, to shade emo-
tions, turn sour what is sweet and sweet what
is sour.
At the Wigmore Hall, following a ravish-
ing performance by Jocelyn Daubigney of a
shape-shifting flute concerto by Jean-Marie
Leclair, the classy Talens Lyriques, under the
sprightly direction of Christophe Rousset,
galloped into the suite from Castor et Pol-
lux. From the fierce overture, the bassoon
babbling ballistically as if she’d swallowed
a bee, we travel through drunken country
dances, a folicky Minuet and a bosky Sara-
bande inhabited by a flute doing a very fine
impression of an owl.
And if all this sounds too fragrant, too
French for you, we ended with two meaty
chaconnes from Castor and Dardanus. It
shows off Rameau’s skills as an architect and
magician, the structure dissolving before our
ears as the variations enter the wilds.