First performed at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris in 1745, the ballet héroique Les Fêtes de Polymnie is one of the less well known products of an extraordinarily productive year in Rameau’s career, one that also saw the premieres of Platée and several other opera-ballets, two of them collaborations with Voltaire. Built out of a majestic prologue and three self-contained though thematically linked entrées, Les Fêtes de Polymnie is effectively a series of tableaux designed as lavish, exotic entertainment, with just a hint of a masonic message, too. This Hungarian-sourced performance, conducted by György Vashegyi, certainly emphasises the music’s colour, grandeur and rhythmic vitality, though the slightly boomy recording acoustic isn’t ideal. The cast is good, a well-balanced mix of Hungarian and French singers, with the soprano Aurélia Legay leading things off as Mnemosyne in the prologue, the tenor Mathias Vidal as Alcide in the first of the entrées, and the exquisite Véronique Gens as Stratonice and Oraide in the second and third of them.
