Rameau’s Les Fêtes d’Hébé: making a song and dance about it

It’s taken almost 300 years for the French composer’s genre-crossing opéra-ballet to come to the UK, with a Royal College of Music staging opening tomorrow. Why the wait? This week the Royal College of Music is staging a UK premiere of an opera so successful that it had 80 performances in its first year in France and four revivals over the following three decades. And yet it’s taken 278 years for it to come to the UK. It is startling to realise that there has not yet bee