Here is a very special recording devoted to early 18th-century dance music for which we have recently rediscovered choreographies from the period. Such a discovery may well come as a surprise, since it is not generally realised that, long before the proliferation of various 20th-century systems of dance notation, an earlied system had already been invented and them forgotten, only to be rediscovered within the last few years.

For approaching a century and a half in France – across the reigns of Louis XIV, XV and XVI – the Palace of Versailles played host, both indoors and outdoors, for an extraordinary sequence of dramatic musical performances. Un Opéra pour trois rois, conducted by György Vashegyi, represents the legacy of that time, a specially constructed operatic entertainment drawn from works by composers from Lully to Gluck, commissioned – and even, on occasion, performed – by kings, their queens and inamoratas.

Loin des sentiers battus, entre les grands Français Lully et Rameau en passant par Couperin, il y a de la place pour des personnalités comme celles de Campra et Destouches. Les trois suites d’orchestre (datées du début du xviiie siècle) rassemblées ici sont tirées d’opéras ballets, genre musical particulièrement à la mode à la cour de Versailles. Successeur du ballet de cour et très longtemps avant les Ballets russes, la danse était au cœur du geste baroque. Que ce soit par l’escrime ou par les mouvements des danseurs, il y a bien cette volonté de représenter l’univers, ses forces et tutti quanti.

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.

Vaste opéra-ballet composé à quatre mains par A. C. Destouches et M.-R Delalande, les Éléments se déchaînent sous les archets de l'ensemble Les Surprises. Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas en a concocté une version « de salon » regroupant les plus beaux extraits de ce chef-d'œuvre inédit au disque.