Dardanus is a 119-minute studio album of Jean-Philippe Rameau's opera, performed by a cast led by José van Dam, Michael Devlin, Veronique Dietschy, Christiane Eda-Pierre, Georges Gautier, Roger Soyer and Frederica von Stade with the Chorus and Orchestra of the National Theatre of the Paris Opera under the direction of Raymond Leppard.

Leppard's version omits Rameau's 1739 prologue, cuts some of his ballet sections and replaces his concluding danced chaconne with a chorus of praise for Venus and Love.

[3] Leppard has written a lengthy, tragi-comic account of the staging's many travails, which included a clowning violist, an incompetent organist, wire-flown singers squeaking with terror and a director and designer who abandoned the production midway through its run.

He summed up Paris's Dardanus as one of the worst experiences of his conducting life, an agonizing episode that left a permanent scar on his psyche.

The cover of the CD edition, designed by Mister Brown, shows a detail of Nicolas Poussin's Le jugement de Salomon, a painting in the Louvre, photographed by Hubert Josse.

Noting that Rameau's 1739 and 1744 versions of Dardanus both had strengths and weaknesses, he agreed with Leppard that when it came to compiling a working edition of the piece, "conflation [offered] the best solution".

Of the male singers, the best was José van Dam as the magician Isménor, "noble in tone, with a fine, ringing high register, and most impressive in his invocation of the supernatural powers".

His voice was "dry and worn", his important Act 1 duet with Devlin was "singularly ineffective" and he conveyed "no suggestion of terror or urgency" when announcing the arrival of a Godzilla-like sea monster.

Salter acknowledged that Dardanus was obscure, and that its libretto was a fanciful one - a tale of ill-starred lovers, sorcery, knight-errantry and divine intervention.

Of the soloists, José van Dam was probably the best, but Frederica von Stade and Michael Devlin were strong too; the one disappointment was Georges Gauthier.

His score was wonderful, superb, graceful, charming, delightful, a masterpiece of orchestration and, he insisted, "always real and powerful stage music", lyric drama that could be spoken of in the same breath as that of Monteverdi, Mozart, late Verdi or Wagner.