First recording of the princeps version of Zoroaster by Rameau, score produced by the Baroque Music Center of Versailles. The opera was known in a deeply revised version in 1756. For there had been, in 1749, a cabal against Zoroaster. Rameau, who favored music over text, here abandons “Western” subjects for Persian mythology, a pretext for the librettist Cahusac to carry out a work of proselytism for his Masonic ideals (Mozart was able, 40 years later, to dress up the same ambitions of more subtle finery in The Magic Flute). Fight of good against evil, light and darkness are seen by a sixty-year-old Rameau, at the height of his art through richly characterized atmospheres. As Benoît Dratwicki summarizes in the libretto: the 1756 reworking, offering a more sentimental and less metaphysical plot, also caused the loss of several pages as magnificent as they were unpublished. The team led by Alexis Kossenko is sumptuous and, unlike Acanthus and Cephissus (Warner), the CD is perfectly recorded.
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