Princesse 2 0

Although nowadays Jean-Philippe Rameau is considered the greatest French baroque composer, he only came to real fame when he was already fifty years old. Then, in 1733, his first 'tragédie en musique', Hippolyte et Aricie, was performed in public. This was followed later that decade by Castor et Pollux (1737) and Dardanus (1739) and two 'opéra-ballets', Les Indes galantes (1735) and Les Fêtes d'Hébé (1739). By the 1740s his reputation was such that there was no other composer who could be invited to write the main music to be performed during the festivities at the occasion of the marriage of Dauphin Louis, son of King Louis XV, to Marie-Thérèse of Spain in February 1745. The festivities in Versailles, which lasted a month, started and ended with music by Rameau.

That globetrotting composer Camille Saint-Saëns wrote La Princesse jaune in 1872, exemplifying the current craze for all things Japanese. Kornélis, played by the tenor Mathias Vidal, dreams only of the Land of the Rising Sun. Under the influence of a hallucinogenic potion, he becomes infatuated with Ming, a fantasy princess. His cousin Léna – the soprano Judith van Wanroij – despairs of this passion and does not dare to confess her own feelings to Kornélis, who eventually comes to his senses. The running time of this opera enables us to offer a coupling in the shape of a previously unrecorded version of Saint-Saëns’s six Mélodies persanes, thus extending the guiding thread of a yearning for exotic horizons in another direction. Leo Hussain conducts the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse in both works.