European Union Baroque Orchestra

Danse des Zéphirs

Lars Ulrik Mortensen (director), Zefira Valova (concertmaster)

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.

Recorded: 27.7.2012, Ljubljana, Slovenian Philharmonic