TWO REVOLUTIONARIES JOIN HANDS When one sees the statue of Jean-Philippe Rameau standing on a plinth in his birthplace of Dijon, elegantly dressed, haughty in his demeanour and gazing thoughtfully into the distance, it is hard to believe that this civilized composer s contemporaries could have become so worked up as to wage a cultural war. Rameau s career had in fact started out in the most unspectacular way. He was born in Dijon in 1683, the seventh of the eleven children of one of the local organists. Professionally speaking, he followed in his father s footsteps, although he seems to have led an unsettled life until he was almost forty, working in different places, including Paris, where he is documented between 1706 and 1709 and where his first harpsichord works appeared in print. He then returned south, spending time in Dijon, Lyon and Clermont-Ferrand, before travelling back to Paris in 1722 and spending the next forty-two years there prior to his death in 1764. When he returned to the capital in 1722, he had with him a manuscript that he published soon afterwards under the title Traité de l harmonie, a work which for two centuries was to remain the basis of harmony, creating a minor theoretical revolution that marked the end of one age and the beginning of a new one. At the risk of oversimplification we could say that Rameau ensconced the triad on the throne of harmonic theory. Rameau was fifty when he enjoyed his first operatic success, albeit one that brought down on his head the implacable hatred of the traditionalists, who looked on in horror as many of the hallowed traditions of the tragédie lyrique were overturned, traditions that Lully had established as fixed principles some sixty years earlier. The cultural scene in Paris was soon riven by discord, the two opposing factions locked in bitter conflict, with the traditionalist lullistes ranged against the progressive ramistes. In 1982, two hundred and fifty years later, the then nineteen-year-old Marc Minkowski founded his own ensemble: Les Musiciens du Louvre. Minkowski had studied the bassoon before taking conducting lessons at the Pierre Monteux Memorial School in Maine, USA. The ensemble takes its name from the Louvre, the former home of the French monarchs that the Sun King, Louis XIV, abandoned in favour of Versailles, where he sought to give grandiloquent expression to his vision of France s greatness as a nation. Such a name seems strange. After all, the rediscovery of music from the age of Louis XIV was a great talking point in the early music movement in France in the 1980s, and yet Minkowski chose the old residence, which is now a centre of international culture as a museum and an art gallery, suggesting that he had a further campaign in his sights. And, indeed, it was not long before his vision had expanded to include not only leading composers such as Lully, Campra, Marais and Rameau himself but also Handel, Mozart and, in the 19th century, Rossini, Offenbach, Bizet and Berlioz. Numerous recordings on CD and DVD, together with a busy concert schedule, have ensured that Marc Minkowski and his Musiciens du Louvre are now internationally known as a byword for an independent style of music-making that combines a true respect for the original with a delight in experimentation and a real joy in communicating the music. It was this spirit that led at the beginning of the new millennium to the idea of a unique project associated with Rameau. Although Rameau was a great innovator whose fundamental research in the field of harmony looked far into the future, he actually left no orchestral music as such. But the ballets and instrumental numbers in his operas abound in atmosphere and reveal so many orchestral tone colours that Marc Minkowski decided to remove a number of these jewels from their original settings and fit them together in a new form that