This is the story of Phaéton, valiant driver of the Sun’s chariot, led here by Vincent Dumestre and Benjamin Lazar, armed with a rich acquaintance of two decades of Lullyist cooperation. Just like at the time, they will make the Versailles Opera resonate with this production of this flamboyant tragédie lyrique which was first presented in Perm in Russia in 2018.
Borodin’s splendid epic of Old Russia was recorded in Paris in 1966 with the forces of Sofia National Opera, conducted by Polish-born Jerzy Semkow, a protégé of the legendary Russian maestro Yevgeny Mravinsky. The great Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff, a master of vocal characterisation, takes two roles: Prince Igor’s wicked brother-in-law Prince Galitsky and the surprisingly benign Khan Konchak, who famously commands his people, the Polovtsy, to dance for his noble Russian prisoner of war.
The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande is a Swiss symphony orchestra, based in Geneva at the Victoria Hall. In addition to symphony concerts, the OSR performs as the opera orchestra in productions at the Grand Théâtre de Genève.
Jean-Philippe Rameau's opéra-ballet Les Indes Galantes premiered in Paris in 1735 but was not a critical success, so the composer prepared a revised version that included an additional act. The five suites the composer extracted are derived from the prologue and four acts, and the brief movements include orchestral arrangements of vocal numbers as well as instrumental pieces. The work displays Rameau's flair for creating evocative and compelling music for the wide variety of the opéra-ballet's dramatic situations, as well as his ear for imaginative orchestration. Familiarity with the plot is not required for appreciating the charms of these colorful miniatures.
It is a well-established fact that our approach to music is generally twofold: this is the physicists' as well as the musicians' doing. One the one hand, music is considered to be based on acoustics, or even mathematics, which ought to give it the status of a science; on the other hand , it is acknowledged that it proceeds from psychological and sociological phenomena which, over the ages, have developed into an art, itself depending on various crafts. There is no longer any contradiction between the two approaches so long as one is prepared to accept them jointly, with enough insight to respect the methods proper to each end of the "chain."