This double album offers a portrait of the violinist Amandine Beyer drawn from the recordings she has made for ZZT. The first CD selects highlights from her chamber repertoire, including works by Jean-Féry Rebel, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Nicola Matteis, and Robert de Visée. The second is devoted to the concerto, with compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, and Arcangelo Corelli. This programme is an ideal introduction to the multiple facets of Amandine Beyer’s talent and to the grace and joie de vivre of her music-making. It also provides an opportunity to discover one of Corelli’s Concerti Grossi op.6, a preview of the complete set to be released on ZZT in the autumn of 2013.

A powerful performance of French baroque by Rebel and Marais from the popular Palladians.
'The music making is gratifyingly direct – gripping, animated, and sometimes positively visceral' (International Record Review).

Violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte and harpsichordist Justin Taylor, two of the most promising virtuosos of the new generation and founder members of the ensemble Le Consort, now present a duo album that pays tribute to a great eighteenth-century dynasty of musicians, the violinists and composers of the Francoeur family. The sonatas of Louis Francoeur (c.1692-1745), known as Francoeur the Elder, and those of his brother François (1698-1787) are dance suites featuring polyphonic effects produced by the use of double stopping. Justin and Théotime bring these varied treasures back to life with the energy and grace for which they are already well known.

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.

Harmonia Mundi's Rebel: Elements – Vivaldi: Four Seasons combines two of the Baroque's biggest instrumental barnburners as performed by one of the top period instrument groups in Europe, Akademie für Alte Musik, Berlin, under the leadership of concertmasters Clemens-Maria Nuszbaumer and Georg Kallweit and featuring their star attraction, violinist Midori Seiler. Like Vivaldi's often derided as over-familiar Four Seasons, Jean-Féry Rebel's 1737 ballet Les Éléments does not want for good recordings, but it is nowhere near as famous as the Vivaldi; this is the first time the two have been combined on a recording, and these pieces are quite compatible given their shared, programmatic purposes.

The 18th century was a time when deportment and noble behavior were essential for people of quality. Dance formed a major part of all social ceremonies and theatrical presentations. Nowhere was dancing more highly regarded than in France, where ballets de cour assumed great importance, and the Lullian tragedie en musique had its counterpart in the ballet en action of the opera-ballet. The Fantaisie (1729) and Plaisirs champetres (1734) of Jean-Fiery Rebel, reflecting the differing personalities of their prima ballerinas Camargo and Salle, have been called choreographic symphonies.

The discovery of Rebels (1666-1747) Dance Symphonies, a genre mixing dance and pantomime in which the narration is delivered by the dancer alone, was a defining moment in the passion of harpsichordist duo Loris Barrucand and Clément Geoffroy. Rebel, the author of a single Lyric Tragedy, Ulysse (1703), and Elémens (1737) a suite of symphonies famed for its initial Chaos, was first and foremost a composer of symphonies that were made to be danced. Among them is Les Caractères de la Danse (1715), an uninterrupted succession of fourteen dances that enjoyed a dazzling success. Remaining faithful to his time, Rebel intended for them to be played like a piece on the harpsichord.

The Italian-style trio sonata, honed by Corelli into a monument of seventeenth century classicism with its perfect balance of new-found tonality and assimilation of dance forms into art music, had a hard time finding a foothold in France. Among other aspects, the unwillingness to abandon the dance suite – possibly caused by the privileged position of ballet as a royal pastime at the court of Louis XIV – meant that French composers waited until the end of the century to compose "proper" trio sonatas. But a great deal of experimentation with the form went on before that, and not surprisingly one of the experimenters was the Italian "immigrant" Lully. His rôle at the court of the Sun-king included providing small-scale works for the Coucher du Roi, the nightly ceremony marking the king's withdrawal to bed.

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.

Having been relegated to a moral space of exclusion and fear in the Middle Ages, madness subsequently became a major social phenomenon. Brought under control and personified as 'Folly' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it provided scope for social and moral criticism, leading composers and librettists to give it a prominent place on the operatic stage. Here Stphanie d'Oustrac and the Amarillis ensemble present its multiple facets, from seduction to passionate love, from despair to joy, revealing the underlying truths of humanity in the Baroque era.

A beautifully-packaged 50-disc box set, released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, one of the most important and adventurous early music labels. The set contains 50 classic recordings of baroque and ancient music, chosen to represent the breadth of this huge and varied catalogue and each disc is slip-cased with artwork replicating the original CD or LP artwork.

'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.

Soprano Sandrine Piau's new project is dedicated to French baroque repertoire, offering a wide range of very beautiful arias by Rameau, Lully, Campra etc in a 100-year journey that mixes very famous music with little-know pieces, such as arias by Grétry or Sacchini > Sandrine Piau and Jérôme Correas, a former singer, founder and music director of Les Paladins, have worked together on a regular basis since their early careers, especially with William Christie.

Les trois oeuvres enregistrées ici sont "Tombeau de M. de Lulli" (1695), "Les Caractères de la Danse" (1715) & "Les Elémens" (1737). La première est un vibrant hommage à celui qui fut le "mentor" de Rebel. Ecrite pour ensemble instrumental, cette pièce aux caractères changeants adopte une ritournelle déchirante qui réapparait entre chaque mouvements rapides. Les deux dernières sont des "symphonies chorégraphiques" où les mouvements de danses ont une place de choix (notamment dans les "Caractères de la Danse" ; le public de l'époque était friand de ces pièces ("Courante", "Chaconne", "Rigaudon", "Passepied"…)). Le "Prélude" des "Elémens" est une représentation du "Chaos", dont le tout premier accord est une des pages les plus célèbres de son auteur.

In their fifth release with Dorian Sono Luminus, REBEL explodes through the speakers with this exciting collection of Quartets and Quintets by prolific composer Georg Philip Telemann. Telemann was probably the most famous and commercially successful composer working in Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century. The consummate stylist, Telemann was always striving to write music that was up to the minute. This helped make him one of the most popular composers of his day and of ours.