Jean Philippe Rameau: Platee

Live from the Opéra national de Paris, Palais Garnier, 2002

This Opéra de Paris staging of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s burlesque on the vicissitudes of love, is a “pure joy from start to splashing finish” (Wall Street Journal Europe). “Laurent Pelly’s staging of Platée is an exhilarating display of gags and West Side Story dance routines mixed in with satirical rap… Marc Minkowski conducting the excellent Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble was the instigator of a sparkling orchestral fête” (Opera Now). The enthusiastic cast is led by Paul Agnew in the title role and Mireille Delunsch, who provides one of the many musical highlights with La Folie’s famous bravura aria.

In the realm of the ancient gods, Mercure and Cithéron persuade Jupiter that he can cure his wife Junon’s obsessive jealousy by setting up a mock marriage between himself and Platée, an astonishingly ugly but supremely self-confident marsh nymph who rules a realm of frogs. Rameau uses Jupiter’s feigned courtship of Platée to gleefully parody every eighteenth-century musical convention in the book, as the music gurgles, hiccups, croaks and brays.