Rameau: Zoroastre – Kossenko

Rameau buried this score for a reason, or so the Paris critics of 1749 thought — and for two and a half centuries almost everyone took their word for it. What a strange, bracing thing, then, to hear the original Zoroastre restored and played as if the intervening 273 years of neglect never happened.

Start with the overture. No Prologue, no ritual bowing to Louis XV before the drama begins. Rameau just plunges in, and the effect, even now, is startling. Alexis Kossenko and his band Les Ambassadeurs ~ La Grande Écurie attack it with a bite that tells you immediately this will not be some powdered, decorous evening of galanterie. The clarinets — yes, clarinets, a novelty so fresh to French opera in 1749 that no printed score even bothers to notate them, their presence surviving only in a payroll ledger — poke through the texture with a reedy, slightly wild color that no modern edition prepared me for. It’s a small thing. It matters anyway.

The opera itself is peculiar, ambitious, occasionally ungainly: Rameau and his librettist Cahusac attempting something closer to Masonic allegory than conventional tragédie lyrique. Light against dark. Reason against superstition. Zoroastre himself is patently a forebear of Mozart’s Sarastro (the name similarity is no accident), and Abramane, his sorcerer-adversary, anticipates the Queen of the Night’s fury without her coloratura fireworks. Cahusac’s libretto wants to be about ideas. Sometimes the ideas outrun the drama; the middle acts sag under the weight of allegorical machinery, ballets of furies and génies interrupting what little narrative momentum exists. You can see why the Paris audience of 1749, weaned on Lully’s more compact dramaturgy, found it top-heavy. You can also see, now, why Rameau himself wasn’t wrong to think there was something here worth saving, even if he ended up gutting three acts of it for the 1756 revision.

Reinoud Van Mechelen sings the title role with a clean, forward tone that never forces: haute-contre singing of real elegance, if perhaps not quite the visionary intensity the role’s philosophical weight invites. He’s persuasive in the Act Five apotheosis, where light triumphs and the chorus swells around him; earlier, in the confrontations with Abramane, I wanted more danger in the voice, more sense of a man under siege.

Tassis Christoyannis, though. Christoyannis is the reason to own this set. His Abramane growls and seethes with theatrical relish, a genuine villain rather than a generic baritone menace, and he phrases the invocation scenes with a rhetorical freedom that feels improvised even when you know it can’t be. Every syllable lands.

Véronique Gens, decades into a career largely built on this repertoire, brings Erinice a gravity and vocal weight that the more decorative Amélite, sung with bright agility by Jodie Devos, doesn’t require. It’s a nice contrast: two sopranos representing two very different kinds of femininity in Cahusac’s scheme, virtue against jealous ambition, and the casting honors that distinction without overplaying it. Devos’s tone has an ingenue’s silvery ease; Gens digs in, darker, more wounded.

The smaller roles are cast from real strength. Mathias Vidal, David Witczak, Gwendoline Blondeel: no weak link. The Chœur de Chambre de Namur sings with the kind of blended, forward-placed tone Alpha’s engineers have favored on prior Kossenko projects, and here it pays off in the great choral tableaux — the darkness-to-light transformation of the finale genuinely thrills.

Where does this leave the piece in the catalog? There isn’t much competition. The 1756 version has had the occasional outing (Christie’s forces, decades back, among others), but this 1749 original has been essentially unrecorded complete until now. That alone makes the set indispensable to anyone serious about Rameau. Whether the 1749 Zoroastre deserves permanent rehabilitation, or whether the Paris critics had a point after all, I’m honestly not sure. The drama does sprawl, and not every allegorical detour earns its keep. But the score brims with invention, the playing is sinewy and alive, the singing mostly first-rate. Three discs, no wasted opportunity. Rameau scholars, and I count myself an amateur among them after forty-some years of listening, will want this urgently. So should anyone who thinks they already know what French baroque opera sounds like.