Danse des Zéphirs

Director Lars Ulrik Mortensen (DK)

Concertmaster Zefira Valova (BG)

Performance dates 19-29 July and 2&4 November

The opening of Les Elémens, Rebel’s best known work (1737) is the most startling in all baroque music. The composer said that ‘The introduction…is Chaos itself, the confusion that reigned between the Elements before the instant when, obeying unchanging laws, they had taken the places assigned to them in the Natural order’. To illustrate this, the orchestra plays every note of the D minor scale simultaneously, eventually resolving to a single note representing Earth. The elements are represented in the dances: Water and Earth in the Loure; Air in the Ramage, and Fire in the Chaconne. Les Caractères de la Danse is a ballet suite remarkable for its survey of different dance forms – 11 in all – which flash past often in a matter of seconds. Danse des Zéphirs includes some of the finest and most colourful movements from Rameau’s opera Les Boréades.

Lars Ulrik Mortensen

Venues

Baroque Splash!

Director Margaret Faultless (UK)

Concertmaster Mechthild Karkow (DE)

Performance dates 7-16 September

When devising a concert programme to include works by the three giants of the German high baroque, one is bound to include some of the finest repertoire of the age and in doing so will create a celebration of the sound world of the grand baroque orchestral style. Telemann’s ‘water’ music, written for the centenary for the Hamburg Admiralty, includes some representational elements but most of the movements are wonderfully standard dance forms of the 18th century with quirky, evocative, rather charming titles. Handel's Water Music was famously premiered on a barge on the River Thames after King George I had the idea of a watery idiosyncratic venue for an event. The formality of the concert hall was clearly not so firmly established in the 18th century, nor were rigid composing traditions. Many composers re-worked their material for different combinations of instruments and 'arranged' pieces for different occasions; there was little or no precedent for playing 'old' music so invention was the order of the day. Bach's fourth orchestral suite began its life as a version for strings and wind – and was only later reworked to include trumpets and timpani, and then yet again adding a choir. Like Telemann and Handel, Bach explores the conventions of the French ouverture during the first movement and then uses many dance forms, all totally familiar to the audience of the day, some conventionally and others with a delicious twist that breaks with convention, but all with the genius that has kept his music alive for the past 300 years.

Margaret Faultless

Venues

Corelli’s Legacy

Director Riccardo Minasi (IT)

Concertmaster Kinga Ujszászi (HU)

Performance dates 11-17 October

The lionising of Arcangelo Corelli “il Bolognese” during his lifetime no doubt contributed to the revival of Rome as the European capital of culture at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Key elements in the spread throughout Europe of Corelli’s reputation were the continuous growth of major violin schools deriving directly or indirectly from the school of “il Bolognese”, the adherence to his aesthetic vision by composers belonging to the operatic world which was increasingly in vogue, but especially the continued commitment to popularizing his message abroad by those who had the good fortune to study personally with Corelli [or perhaps the unstoppable flight of Italian violinists abroad looking for new and more stable employment opportunities, still as timely as ever].

So listening to this programme you will come across many different European styles, from some of the most famous works of Corelli to those of lesser-known composers such as Pietro Castrucci, Giovanni Mossi, Giuseppe Valentini and Antonio Montanari; a rich mix of formal and aesthetic visions, though all refined through the same profoundly Roman ‘filter’.

Maybe it is not true that "all roads lead to Rome"; certainly the experience of the composers featured in this programme is that everything starts from the eternal city!

Venues

All roads lead to Rome

Director Lars Ulrik Mortensen (DK)

Concertmaster Bojan Čičić (HR)

Performance dates 9-17 November

The theme for this EUBO programme is music in Italy around 1700 – music composed slightly before the turn of the century, music composed in 1700 and music composed slightly after, together forming a kaleidoscope of instrumental music as might have been heard in Rome at that time.

Venues

Myth and Magic

Director Paul Agnew (UK)

Soprano Rachel Redmond (UK)

Soprano Elodie Fonnard (FR)

Tenor Reinhoud van Mechelen (BE)

Bass Yannis François (FR)

Concertmaster Huw Daniel (UK)

Performance dates 3-14 December

EUBO is joined by Paul Agnew (co-director of Les Arts Florissants) and a team of brilliant young singers from the Jardin des Voix programme to present two dramatic baroque masterpieces in concert version, delivered with an infectious undimmed sense of discovery and enjoyment.

 Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) was a consummate expert at weaving ballet movements and descriptive effects into the dramatic fabric of his works. Here he sets the enduring Pigmalion myth. A sculptor (Pigmalion, sung by the tenor) creates a beautiful statue to which he declares his love and entreats the goddess Venus to bring his statue to life. Magically the statue comes alive, sings, and dances; L'Amour praises Pigmalion for his artistry and sings to the power of love. A sequence of the most glorious dance music follows: so colourfully is this music written that even in concert version the story comes alive in the imaginary theatre of the mind.  

Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, written in 1692 and based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, is in the semi-opera tradition, where supernatural beings, and pastoral and comic characters, provide the musical interludes between the ‘masques’ and ‘anti-masques’. Borrowing ideas from French opera, English semi-operas had a bad reputation as vulgar and commercial, but they drew audiences in unprecedented numbers and left them dazzled and delighted. In this specially commissioned abridged version the ‘Masque of the Enchantments: Titania’s Sleep’ is followed by the slap-stick anti-masque ‘Coridon and Mopsa’. Instrumental dances give way to the ‘Masque of the Seasons: Oberon’s Birthday’ and, after a comic anti-masque scene between two fairies and a drunken Poet, the evening is rounded off with jolly Hornpipe.

Venues