Tempesta di Mare - Comedie et Tragedie Vol. 1: Lully, Marais, Rebel (2015)

The first volume of Tempesta di Mare's series on Chandos, Comedie et Tragedie, offers period-style performances of orchestral music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Fery Rebel, and Marin Marais. The orchestral suites drawn from Lully's music for Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Rebel's symphonie nouvelle Les elemens, and Marais' suite from the tragedie en musique Alcyone give a taste of theater music in the court of Louis XIV and Louis XV, and these pieces show how inventive composers were with instrumentation and their combinations of dances with dramatic scene painting. Tempesta di Mare, which is also known as the Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra, gives bright and energetic performances, and the musicians have a fine sense of the swung rhythms, distinctive tone colors, and lively ornamentation in French Baroque music. The recording is clear and well-balanced, though the percussion in Lully's March for the Turkish Ceremony (track 4) is a bit startling, and the dissonant opening of Rebel's Le Chaos (track 13) has its own shock value. Highly recommended. -- Blair Sanderson