The Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood - Rebel, Destouches: Les Elémens (1980)

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. Sixteen years later, the boldness of the initial chaos that had ensued excited Rebel’s imagination. This non-danced prologue starts with a harmonic section containing all notes of the scale over two bars followed by seven sections representing the seven days of Creation with clever harmonisation and highly varied instrumentation. These two ballets were recorded by Christopher Hogwood at The Academy of Ancient Music in 1980 for L’Oiseau-Lyre. Care and wisdom seem to guide this interpretation born out of a decade of amazing and sumptuous musical and musicological rediscoveries which culminated with the brilliant resurrection of Lully’s Atys by William Christie in Paris in 1986.