Four decades ago, John Eliot Gardiner dusted off and recorded Scylla et Glaucus, the one and only opera by Jean-Marie Leclaire (1698–1764), known to music historians as the founder of the French violin school. “If the campaign to rehabilitate Rameau and to win recognition for his operas has met with limited success so far, even—especially, perhaps—in his native France,” Gardiner wrote back then, “what hope can there be for Leclair’s lone operatic venture? Oddly enough, perhaps more; for Leclair’s operatic style, closely modelled as it is on Rameau’s, is a little less learned, less sophisticated, less quintessentially French, and therefore, paradoxically, liable to be less irritating—at least to the contemporary French listener.” Faint praise, indeed, for a score that proves to be simply ravishing from start to finish. Readers of the Odyssey remember Scylla as the cliff-dwelling monster who plucks sailors from ships sailing too close in their attempt to avoid the maelstrom of Charybdis. Leclair’s libretto, after Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reveals how Scylla got that way. We meet her as a lovely loner who has the misfortune to catch the eye of Glaucus, a fisherman. And Glaucus has the misfortune of having the same effect on the witch Circe, to whom he turns for assistance. Zurich’s rare revival is directed by the veteran Claus Guth, who recently made a belated Metropolitan Opera debut with his surreal, psychologically astute Salome. The Baroque specialist Emmanuelle Haïm leads her renowned period band Le Concert d’Astrée. Elsa Benois and Anthony take the title roles. —Matthew Gurewitsch