Prom 3: Campra and Rameau

No gain without pain seems to be the abiding principle behind the BBC's PROM programmes. The piece or pieces you really came to hear are rarely given the pre-interval slot.

And so this generally white and occasionally sandal-wearing middle-aged crowd had to endure the muted melancholy of Campra's Requiem before they could begin to roar their approval for the underprivileged kids from South Africa's townships that joined John Elliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists in their hour-long celebration of the music of Jean Phillipe Rameau. (A passing mention here for the HIP − historically influenced performance − of the Compagnie Roussat-Lubek, a dance troupe consisting mainly of young French girls of the gamine variety.)

Noting the absence of Rameau's catchy Danse des Sauvages, I nevertheless suspected the potential here for the kind of uncomfortable spectacle reminiscent of the Jesuits teaching the Guaraní indians to play European stringed instruments in the great South American missions (as seen in Roland Joffé's 1986 film The Mission), but in fact something very interesting occured: when the Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble and Dance for All (many in full warrior garb) merged with the main orchestra and Mexican-waving Monterverdi choir for the finale, their own artistic 'liberation' was less at the forefront than the liberating effect they seemed to have on the usually more confined configuration of classical performance.

And Rameau has proved to be the catalyst for such a revelation. There is surely no composer before Beethoven (and perhaps indeed after) whose compositions reward such enthusiastic physicality in their rendition. My first exposure to Rameau's music was back in 1987 when I went to see Aria, a collaboration between Robert Altman, Bruce Beresford and several other fairly experimental directors. Each had made a short film around their favourite operatic aria. Derek Jarman memorably chose Depuis le jour from Charpentier's Louise. Altman himself selected a segment from Rameau's final opera Les Boréades and I found the rhthymic innovation utterly captivating.

It seems that when Rosemary Nalden turned up in Soweto with her violins the musically-inclined kids she gathered there at first tended to find classical composers like Mozart and Haydn a bit of a struggle. Only when works by Rameau were introduced into their repertoire did the programme really take off. Go and listen...