Rameau's Castor et Pollux, Theater an der Wien

For us Ramistes the brilliance came as no surprise. But did the genius come across to the uninitiated? This new production of Castor et Pollux, one of Rameau's finest tragédie en musique, was the Baroque composer's Austrian stage premiere.

They had help. Following on from their superbly perky adaptation of Rameau's opéra comique Platée at the Opéra du Rhin in Strasbourg last year, conductor Christophe Rousset and director Mariame Clément have teamed up again to great effect. Plumping for the later, more dramatic 1756 version of the work - that nonetheless sees the removal of the spectacular prologue and several dances - Rousset and Clément haul proceedings into the 1930s and the grand stairwell of a bourgeois mansion. They scrub it of its static Classical gravity and reveal a fragile, cracked surface full of the emotional toing and froing of a modern family saga.

From the beginning, we see a sober, clear directorial purpose. Clément's aim seems modest but wise: to invest the Enlightenment conundrum at its centre (which are stronger: the affairs of the loins or bonds of brotherly love?) with as much psychological realism as the story can take. Everything is focused on summoning up a plausible, kinetic, modern drama as Pollux and Castor's ill-fated love of Télaïre sends them spinning into the gardens of heaven and the confines of hell. Even the ballets, divested of dance, are requisitioned for the effort, and offer a back story that lead us through the brothers' childhood at the feet of Jupiter and Leda. We aren't far from Bergman's Fanny och Alexander with its weddings and funerals and pregnant unease.

Sometimes Clément squeezes the myth too hard for psychological ends. The high jinks and spectacle that was crucial to distinguishing the tragédie en musique from its non-musical cousin was a little conspicuous by its absence. I thirsted at times for some dance. I thirsted at times for some flights of fancy such as we were treated to in Emanuel Schikaneder's theatre itself, whose small boxes, each flanked by golden diving Atlantes, magnify the occupants like something from Alice's Wonderland. But drama was to be had. There were several impressive funerary tableaux, reminiscent of the paintings of Poussin and David (see picture above), which punctuated the evening memorably.

And the music gained from a tight approach. Rameau is, like Wagner, an ocean-going composer. Vast distances are covered. Extraordinary adventures are faced. Great moral tests are overcome. In Castor et Pollux, for example, Pollux must fetch Castor from hell. These heroic travails are always sweaty musical journeys, built around uniquely leggy recitatives that sail long and lonely distances, rising and breaking, batting back reflections and oily darknesses, like the shattered surface of the sea. None of the intensity of the musical language - its subtlety and contradictions, the way major keys usher in tragedy and minor keys herald sweetness and succour - is wasted by Clément. There was some fine direction of Dietrich Henschel's tested Pollux, Christiane Karg's long-suffering Télaïre and Anne Sofie von Otter's tragic Phébé.

The roughness of the ride is as much down to Rousset and his Les Talens Lyrique as Clément. Rousset had a confident edge to his speeds and propulsion. Charm, elegance and equilibrium - which for some would feature more prominently - are eviscerated in these choppy waters. The second act in which we mourn the death of Castor was utterly compelling. Drums and low-lying instruments were given free rein to let rip. Throughout, the bounty of Rameau's orchestration was made the most of.