Debussy conducted a version of Rameau’s one-act Anacréon back in 1909, but it has taken the scholarly ingenuity of Jonathan Williams and a major collaboration to revive it in our time. This Rameau project, involving Oxford University and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, shows how integrated research and performance have now become. The music here is well worth restoring: the instrumental dances full of burbling flutes, whooping horns and beating drums show Rameau as thoroughly contemporary in his vivid imagination; they rather overwhelm the paler vocal lines. This performance does not quite achieve the elan and rhythmic lift of the greatest Rameau recordings, but it’s an important landmark.
