Les Talens Lyriques/Christophe Rousset review – 'glorious score and well-nigh perfect cast'

2014 is Rameau year – the 250th anniversary of his death, to be precise – and I can't think of a better way of marking it than this concert performance of his 1735 opera-ballet Les Indes Galantes, with Christophe Rousset conducting Les Talens Lyriques and a cast that recently sang the work on stage in Bordeaux.

A loosely structured disquisition on the nature of desire, the score is one of the glories of 18th-century music, though some might have doubts about the subject. The goddess Hebe, alarmed that Europe is making war, not love, dispatches Cupid farther afield in search of new followers. What follows is a series of contrasting one-act pieces set mostly in colonial outposts – Peru, the New World, "an island in the Indian Ocean" – where the locals are, for the most part, discovered to be morally superior to their conquerors. This isn't, however, quite as progressive as it sounds. The text sees colonists and colonised living together in idealised harmony, as well as tapping into the exoticist strain in French culture that culminated in the ideas of "noble savagery" that informed the works of Rousseau and Chateaubriand.

Rameau's primary inspiration, however, was sex, not politics, and the score is a masterpiece of discreet eroticism. Rousset and his ensemble mined its tensions and subtleties for all they were worth. The playing was beautifully textured, the choral singing, from the chorus of the Opéra National de Bordeaux, perfectly honed and proportioned. A cast of six, all well-nigh perfect, played multiple roles.

Amel Brahim-Djelloul, wonderfully passionate as Hebe and imperious as the possessive sultana, Fatime; Judith van Wanroij as harem girl Atalide, and Anders J Dahlin, touching as sorrowing husband Valère, and very funny as a promiscuous but repeatedly rejected French officer, were particularly outstanding.