Meanwhile, our own Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment has also been excavating the French Baroque. It presents the first-ever recording of Rameau’s 1754 opera/ballet Anacréon – not to be confused (as if you would) with the opera that Rameau helpfully wrote three years later with the same title but entirely different words and music.
This earlier work, a wry one-act divertissement about love, fell into oblivion for 250 years until Jonathan Williams reconstructed it from fragments in dusty Paris libraries. He conducts this performance, which is sweetly sung (Matthew Brook, Anna Dennis, Agustin Prunell-Friend) but a little tame. Madame de Pompadour, whom some scholars believe to have commissioned Anacréon to remind Louis XV of les plaisirs d’amour, would surely have craved a bit more pash. (Signum Classics)