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Christophe Rousset is a harpsichordist, conductor, and founder of Les Talens Lyriques. In this conversation, recorded in Paris, he talks about completing his twenty-year project to record all thirteen of Lully's operas — a composer long dismissed as boring, and why that dismissal gets the history wrong.
We also discuss the young Mozart as musical sponge, absorbing Jommelli and Gassmann before finding his own voice; the Amadeus problem and what it gets wrong about Salieri; the relationship between scholarly knowledge and artistic intuition; and the kind of authority a conductor holds — total in theory, useless if exercised clumsily.
The closing distinction Rousset draws — between playing with rules and breaking them — turns out to be the most revealing thing he says.
In this episode
- Why comparing Lully to Rameau is a category error
- How a twenty-year recording project accumulates rather than gets planned
- The young Mozart's debts to Jommelli and Gassmann
- Scholarliness versus intuition in the rehearsal room
- Power, charm, and persuasion as a conductor
- "Playing with the rules" as a governing philosophy
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