Castor et Pollux (concertante)

• Teodor Currentzis, Musical Direction

• Jeanine De Bique, Telaire
• Stéphanie d’Oustrac, Phébé
• Reinoud van Mechelen, Castor
• Marc Mauillon, Pollux
• Claire Antoine, Minerve/A Servant of Hébé
• Natalia Smirnova, Vénus/A blessed Shadow
• Laurence Kilsby, L´Amour/The high priest of Jupiter/An Athlete

• Utopia, Choir
• Vitaly Polonsky, Choir Rehearsal
• Utopia, Orchestra

Jean-Philippe Rameau was already 50 years old when he wrote his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, in 1733. Although Jean-Baptiste Lully - whose name at the time stood for French opera par excellence - had already died in 1687, a bitter dispute broke out after the premiere between the conservative "Lullists" and the admirers of Rameau's daring modern style. While some found his harmony too dissonant and his break with tradition scandalous, others were enthusiastic about the innovations that emerged from Rameau's long-standing preoccupation with music theory and aesthetic questions. Les Indes galantes from 1735 was followed two years later by the tragédie en musique Castor et Pollux - Rameau's third completed opera. The premiere at the Paris Académie Royale de Musique was eagerly awaited because of the subject matter alone, as the mythical story of the two Dioscuri was a novelty on the musical theatre stage at the time. Rameau probably suggested the material himself to the writer Pierre-Joseph Bernard, who wrote his first libretto, Castor et Pollux: The brothers, the mortal Castor and the immortal Pollux, are both in love with Télaïre, who herself prefers Castor. However, before the opera's action even begins, Castor is murdered. Pollux receives permission from his father Jupiter to free his brother from the underworld in order to reunite him with Télaïre, but he would have to pay for this with his own immortality. For Pollux, an inner struggle now begins between his brotherly loyalty to Castor and his desire for Télaïre. In Castor et Pollux, Rameau combined all the compositional elements for which he was equally famous and notorious, conveying the respective dramatic situation impressively musically in the sometimes highly virtuosic vocal lines as well as in the rich harmony and the differentiated timbres.

(Source: salzburgerfestspiele.at)