Les Indes galantes or the Elsewhere of Love
Opéra-ballet en un prologue et quatre entrées représenté pour la première fois le 23 août 1735 (sans la quatrième entrée) puis le 10 mars 1736 (en intégralité) à l’Académie royale de musique, sur un livret de Louis Fuzelier. Présentée ici dans sa version en « ballet réduit à quatre grands concerts » éditée en 1736.
OPÉRA MIS EN ESPACE
RAPHAËLLE BLIN, dramaturgie
ANKA POSTIC, chorégraphie et danse
MÉLISSA PETIT, soprano
AMBROISINE BRÉ, mezzo-soprano
PETR NEKORANEC, ténor haute-contre
LYSANDRE CHÂLON, baryton
CHOEUR DE CHAMBRE DE NAMUR
THIBAUT LENAERTS, chef de choeur
LES TALENS LYRIQUES
CHRISTOPHE ROUSSET, direction
In 1736, by offering a version of Les Indes galantes “reduced to four grand concerts”, Rameau bequeathed to posterity — in what remains the only published edition of this famous ballet — a refined selection of its most inventive passages, a true distillation of its most sublime vocal and instrumental pages. Far from a simple compilation, these four concerts reveal a coherent musical and dramatic design, shaped by a clear sense of continuity rather than a mere patchwork. Only the famous entrée Les Sauvages was missing, published here in its original form: in collaboration with dramaturge Raphaëlle Blin, we have chosen to reimagine it within an enhanced concert format, drawing inspiration from the material Rameau himself reworked and reshaped elsewhere.
All of this unfolds within a richly imaginative exotic world, whose eccentricity should not obscure the fact that, much like in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, it serves as a mirror held up to Enlightenment society. By bringing dancer Anka Postic into this project, we invite the modernity of contemporary dance and the expressive language of today’s artists: another mirror, revealing our profound affinity with Rameau’s art, an art of movement and vivid emotion.
Christophe Rousset