Hervé Niquet resurrects Ariane et Bacchus (1696), using for the first time the exact performing forces and layout of the Paris Opéra orchestra in 1700 and thus giving us a historically informed version of this tragédie en musique by Marin Marais. The latter became a viol player at the Académie Royale de Musique in 1676, just as his mentor Lully's Atys triumphed there. Lully subsequently initiated him into the skills of operatic composition, and Ariane et Bacchus was premiered nine years after the older man's death. This production, made possible by the support of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, was performed in concert at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to great acclaim in 2022, when Diapason wrote that the work was 'deservedly rescued from oblivion' and was 'magnified by a sober and telling interpretation from Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel, in perfect consonance with a remarkable cast', featuring such luminaries as Judith van Wanroij, Véronique Gens, Mathias Vidal, Hélène Carpentier, Marie Perbost, Matthieu Lécroart, David Witczak, Tomislav Lavoie and Philippe Estèphe.

REVIEW:

The singers are largely splendid. I have praised Judith Van Wanroij, Veronique Gens, Mathias Vidal, and Matthieu Lecroart on previous occasions, in wildly varying repertory (by such composers as Gretry, Felicien David, Gounod, and Saint-Saens). Here they offer exemplary renderings, never allowing concern for the music to interfere with their attention to text or vice-versa. Some of the low-voiced males are a little thin at the bottom end, but that’s not unusual these days in the opera world.

Some of the singers take more than one role (there’s a long prologue, with entirely different roles than the rest of the opera), so you’ll want to follow the libretto, which is given in the booklet in French and good English. If you don’t follow the libretto, you might easily be misled when a singer keeps mentioning the name of a character: s/he is actually often speaking of her/himself. Juno, for one, loves to describe her feelings in the third person. The effect, in her case, strikes me as properly haughty. Fortunately, the various singers have distinctive enough voices and interpretive manners that I gradually learned to tell them apart without recourse to the libretto. Actually, one of the wonderful things about French Baroque opera is that the musical numbers are constantly attractive, with a dance or march or pantomime scene always around the corner. And the phrase structure is often unpredictable, unlike the foursquareness of much music of the late 1700s and early 1800s. So you could, I suppose, listen to Marais’s opera without looking at the libretto at all (or even thinking about the rather episodic plot) and still have a fine time and enjoy many surprises.

Still, the experience is that much richer if you know what Junon or Adraste (to use their French names) is up to at a given moment.

Wow, there’s a whole ‘nother side to Marais that I knew nothing about!

-- American Record Guide