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 ...
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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. Rebel had been court composer to Louis XIV, and his ballet Les Élémens was his most audacious work, offering many novelties that appear to a less pronounced degree in Les Caractères de la danse, La Terpsichore, and Les plaisirs champêtre. Telemann was a younger contemporary of Rebel and a friend of Bach and Handel, and his wide-ranging suites, also called Ouvertures, reflect...
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