Rebel Bakes

'Ulysse' by Jean-Fery Rebel (1666-1747), with its prologue and five acts, was given at the Paris Opera on January 23 1703. The libretto by Henry Guichard, after Homer, recounts the return of Ulysses to Ithaca, where Circe, still in love with him, attempts to regain him by magic. The opera ends in the triumph of love over evil. Rebel followed the formal framework of the lyric tragedies of his master Lully, including some scenes to marvel at. But his orchestral writing also announces Rameau, especially in the depiction of battles, earthquakes or storms.

Baroque instrumental music often took the form of dance suites, which allowed considerable flexibility in the arrangement of minuets, sarabandes, gavottes, bourrées, chaconnes, allemandes, and courantes, mixed with character pieces and even scenic tableaux in the much larger presentations of court ballets. In Terpsichore: Apothéose de la Danse baroque, a splendid 2018 AliaVox release by Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations, works by Jean-Féry Rebel and Georg Philipp Telemann are compared side-by-side to indicate the commonality of practices at the time, as well as the variety of dance music in the hands of two different masters.

Indulging for the first time in Cockney Rebel's debut album – and one uses the word "indulging" deliberately, for like so much else that's this delicious, you cannot help but feel faintly sinful when it's over – is like waking up from a really weird dream, and discovering that reality is weirder still. A handful of Human Menagerie's songs are slight, even forced, and certainly indicative of the group's inexperience. But others – the labyrinthine "Sebastian," the loquacious "Death Trip" in particular – possess confidence, arrogance, and a doomed, decadent madness which astounds. Subject to ruthless dissection, Steve Harley's lyrics were essentially nonsense, a stream of disconnected images whose most gallant achievement is that they usually rhyme. But what could have been perceived as a weakness – or, more generously, an emotionally overwrought attempt to blend Byron with Burroughs – is actually their strength.

Although he created a decadent glam rocker image through early albums like The Human Menagerie and The Psychomodo, Steve Harley soon revealed a romantic heart beating beneath all the artsy sleaze on singles like "Judy Teen" and "Make Me Smile (Come up and See Me)." This 1976 album, the last studio outing Harley would record under the Cockney Rebel banner, allowed him to give full vent to his romantic thoughts via lushly crafted songs about the travails of love. Love Is a Prima Donna features two of Harley's finest songs in the title track, a bracing song that features the writer waxing comical about the pitfalls of love over a briskly paced pop tune that fleshes out its pub-piano melody with flamenco guitar and a choir, and "(Love) Compared With You," a delicately orchestrated love ballad that manages to be touching and heartfelt without lapsing into sappy sentimentality. This album also produced one of Harley's biggest hits with an arty, synthesizer-laced cover of the Beatles' classic "Here Comes the Sun".

If The Human Menagerie, Cockney Rebel's debut album, was a journey into the bowels of decadent cabaret, The Psychomodo, their second, is like a trip to the circus. Except the clowns were more sickly perverted than clowns normally are, and the fun house was filled with rattlesnakes and spiders. Such twists on innocent childhood imagery have transfixed authors from Ray Bradbury to Stephen King, but Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel were the first band to set that same dread to music, and the only ones to make it work. The Psychomodo was also the band's breakthrough album. The Human Menagerie drew wild reviews and curious sales, but it existed as a cult album even after "Judy Teen" swung out of nowhere to give the band a hit single in spring 1974. Then "Mr Soft" rode his bloodied big top themes into town and Rebelmania erupted. The Psychomodo, still possessing one of the most elegantly threatening jackets of any album ever, had no alternative but to clean up. Harley's themes remained essentially the same as last time out – fey, fractured alienation; studied, splintered melancholia, and shattered shards of imagery which mean more in the mind than they ever could on paper.

After discovering François Francoeur's splendid orchestral pieces, the suites de Symphonies pour le festin royal de Monseigneur le Comte d'Artois, I was prompted by curiosity to play some of his magnificent violin sonatas in concert. This confirmed me in the conviction this violinist was undoubtedly one of the most appealing and gifted composers of 18th century France. Then it occurred to me to search his operatic output for the work or works most representative of his talents as an instrumentalist and orchestrator. The collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale soon convinced me that the 'more or less perfect pearl' was right in front of us: Piramé & Thisbé, a tragedie lyrique written in collaboration with his friend and associate François Rebel, three years his junior.

An audacious Boulezian cluster explodes at the beginning of Éléments, simphonie nouvelle, a wordless ballet composed in 1737 by Jean-Féry Rebel in memory of the opera-ballet Les Élements composed by André Cardinal Destouches and Michel Richard de Lalande whose performance was directed by Rebel at the Palais des Tuileries in 1721 when a young Louis XV danced on stage in imitation of his great-grandfather, the Sun King, Louis XIV. While it was declared boring by the eleven-year-old dancing king, the work was nonetheless replayed four times the following year and was the last court ballet in France. Revised by its authors, it became very popular throughout Louis XV’s reign.