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Anthony Lewis

Rameau: Hippolyte et Aricie (2CD)

The first commercial recording of Rameau’s first opera.

As director of an annual series of staged operas at the Barber Institute in the University of Birmingham, Lewis conveyed to first a local audience and then a more international one with these Decca and Argo recordings that Baroque opera should no longer be the preserve of scholars but contained as much lively and powerful drama as the works of Mozart and Puccini.

Rameau’s place in the pantheon of Baroque composers alongside Bach and Handel is now assured but only thanks to the persuasive force and intensity of recordings such as "Hippolyte et Aricie" which was made in Decca’s West Hampstead studios in July 1965, a few months after the Barber Institute staging. The plot describes Phaedra’s incestuous love for her son Hippolytus, his equally hopeless love for Aricia and much violent divine intervention and retribution.

JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU
Hippolyte et Aricie

Aricie – Angela Hickey
Hippolyte – Robert Tear
High Priestess – Sylvia Rhys-Thomas
Phèdre – Janet Baker
Œnone – Patricia Blans
Diane – Rae Woodland
Arcus – Edgar Fleet
Thésée – John Shirley-Quirk
Tisiphone – Gerald English
Pluto – Roger Stalman
Fate I – John Whitworth
Fate II – Keith Erwen
Fate III – John Noble
Mercury – Nigel Rogers
Priestess – Jill Gomez |
Neptune – Christopher Keyte

St. Anthony Singers
Thurston Dart, harpsichord
English Chamber Orchestra
Anthony Lewis