New CD and tour: Dancing for the Sun King
In March 2019, Ensemble Odyssee recorded a new CD, “Dancing with the Sun King” with chamber music by Michel Pignolet de Montéclair (1667-1737) and Jean-Féry Rebel (1666-1747). All of this music was composed to be danced to, either during a ballroom event, like Montéclair’s seldom played Sérénade ou Concert, or for a professional (female) dancer, as in the case of Rebel’s very famous Les caractères de la danse.
For this programme we were lucky to work with a rich colour palette of different instruments: two violins, flutes, oboes, and a musette for the dessus part; two violas for the parties, and a bass group consisting of viola da gamba, basse de violon, bassoon and harpsichord.
The score calls for several different orchestrations; even though the Montéclair pieces are mostly only for one upper voice and bass, we decided to always follow these original indications, and to never change the tutti instrumentation for the sake of “doing something different”.
Baroque dancer Mojca Gal will join us for a tour with this programme, which will have its premiere on 13th of February, followed by several concerts in the Netherlands and abroad in 2020 and 2021.
In december 2019 we released a new video, made by video artist Donna Verheijden, in which Mojca Gal dances to some excerpts from Rebel’s Caractères. Watch it here: