Storms were a common theme in Baroque music, and this double album by Jordi Savall and his Le Concert des Nations Baroque ensemble touches on some lesser-known items in the category and offers a good time from start to finish. The "fêtes marines" (parties on the water) classification may not seem to fit perfectly with the storms, but the Wassermusik, Hamburger Ebb und Fluth (Water Music, Ebb and Flow at Hamburg) of Georg Philipp Telemann, so much less familiar than Handel's similar work, but pretty competitive with it and ...
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Storms were a common theme in Baroque music, and this double album by Jordi Savall and his Le Concert des Nations Baroque ensemble touches on some lesser-known items in the category and offers a good time from start to finish. The "fêtes marines" (parties on the water) classification may not seem to fit perfectly with the storms, but the Wassermusik, Hamburger Ebb und Fluth (Water Music, Ebb and Flow at Hamburg) of Georg Philipp Telemann, so much less familiar than Handel's similar work, but pretty competitive with it and full of traits one thinks of as quintessentially Handelian, is comparatively "breezy" and is of a piece with the other music on the album. Perhaps the most fun is the title work by the underrated Jean-Féry Rebel, an orchestral suite with a full-blown storm at the very beginning. Vivaldi, who excelled at this kind of thing, is represented by the Flute Concerto in F major, RV 433 ("La tempesta di mare"), while the stage tradition that intersected with the purely instrumental storm...
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