John Eliot Gardiner has proved himself a doughty champion of the later French Baroque, cultivating credible performing methods and unearthing undeservedly neglected repertoire. These nine CDs offer both rich musical rewards and an insight into developing approaches to interpretation. The earliest repertoire in the set is the volume of Francois Couperin's 'apotheoses' of Lully and Corelli, a sensual and programmatic feast in which this charmingly didactic composer attempts to reconcile the best of French and Italian taste.
The delightful scenario of L'Apothéose de Lully imagines the composer Lully, one of François Couperin s forebears at the court of Louis XIV, being wafted up to Mount Parnassus by Apollo. There, he meets the Italian muses, and the music becomes that synthesis of the French and Italian styles which Couperin so admired. All of this is captured with grace in Arcangelo's playing under its founder, Jonathan Cohen. The other work on the disc is the sacred Leçons de ténèbres, sung with purity by sopranos Katherine Watson and Anna Dennis and revealing another side to Couperin's art.
The five Sinfonie a Flauto Solo e Basso come from a manuscript in the custody of the Biblioteca Palatino of Parma, the miscellany 'Sinfonie di varij autori' (marking CF-V-23). lt is a collection containing little more than twenty compositions in sonata form, in some cases called sonate and in others slnfonie, works by such ltalian composers os Albinoni, Corelli, Somis, Valentini ond others. Most probably the collection groups together the personal repertoire of a flautist, almost certainly an amateur, active in the first half of the XVIIIth century: the manuscript therefore represents one of the few sources of the ltalian sonata repertoire for flute from the first decades of the Eighteenth-century, the total existence of which is somewhat meagre.
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.
C’était le temps où la France était regardée comme le modèle européen en matière d’art et de culture. Ce symbole de raffinement et de sophistication est ici brillamment représenté par Le Concert des Nations dirigé par Jordi Savall dans un accord franco-allemand de rêve unissant les musiques de Jean-Ferry Rebel et de Georg Philipp Telemann qui s’expriment dans un langage musical supranational formant une sorte d’apothéose de la danse baroque.