Rameau:
Les Paladins - Comédie lyrique in three acts

“The virtuosity of the composer is devilish.” The statement by the critic Pierre Saby shows that, to his contemporaries, Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) was no longer really intimidating. As a virtuoso he dominated all the current dramatic music genres, and he combined them in any way he wanted. The outcome of this was Les Paladins (1760), a mixture of fairy stories, comedy of morals and coarser farce, corresponding to no current pattern – an opera, whose ironic allusions had been much misunderstood. What irritated the public at the time, the “mixture of serious and comic”, is what makes the work especially fascinating today. Here are combined tall stories and farce, erotic and moral, serious and funny, real and fantastic with the lavish richness of Rameau's musical language.

Konrad Junghänel, the Neue Düsseldorfer Hofmusik and a high-carat ensemble of soloists make this long-lost treasure available again for the first time on CD.

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