On Wednesday evening at West Road the Academy of Ancient Music, with Music Director Laurence Cummings and Baroque dance historians and performers Mary Collins and Steven Player, presented an enthralling concert, ‘Le Roi Soleil: the King dances’, exploring the sounds and sights of the glittering court of Louis XIV of France.
These days ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ or a holiday visit to a Flamenco bar in Spain represent the somewhat marginal limits of choreography in popular culture. But during the flamboyant reign of King Louis, himself a committed dancer, the imposition of order on movement chimed with the harmony of its sister art, music to give to the dance wide-ranging cultural and political significance.
Mary and Steven gave a very interesting introduction to what we were about to witness in the concert, stressing the complexities and gradations that existed in the Baroque period among the various dance forms, as well as the status of the performers where differences between the noble dancer and the ‘good’ dancer were precisely instituted.
At the age of 14 Louis had appeared on stage as the sun god Apollo, thus conferring upon him the subsequent title of ‘Le Roi Soleil’, and music and dancing would accompany thereafter every aspect of his life during a long reign (1643-1715). Both arts enabled him to confirm and establish his authority as monarch.
We are familiar with movements in suites by Baroque composers such as Bach – Courante, Menuet, Bourée, Chaconne, Gavotte, Gigue, Sarabande – but what perhaps is a less-known fact is that these terms point to a contemporary acceptance that such music of the day would usually be accompanied by dance.
Wednesday evening’s performance began with work by the long-time Royal Composer for instrumental music, Jaen-Baptiste Lully. He was a friend of Molière and we heard excerpts from ‘Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme’, the last of Lully’s numerous collaborations with the great playwright.
One of these excerpts was ‘Marche pour le Cêrémonie des Turcs’ reflecting Versaille’s role at this time as a multi-cultural refuge for foreigners fleeing their own country. AAM had already explored the musical and cultural significance of Turkey in a ‘New Worlds’ concert in 2022.
However, Lully’s career came to an abrupt and unfortunate end after he accidentally stabbed himself in the foot with his conductor’s staff during a performance. Gangrene set in and he was carried off in 1687 at the age of 55. Laurence Cummings, complete with frock coat and conductor’s staff to maintain the beat of the opening ‘Marche’, probably gave those familiar with that story an uneasy moment or two!
Before the interval we also heard work from Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1685-1729) whose one opera, ‘Céphale et Procris’ was not particularly successful in her day, but is now receiving more favourable attention as it is re-examined in line with current interest in women composers.
Fascinating, too, was learning the way in which women dancers were transforming their art. Hitherto, male dancers had taken women’s roles, but new and individual female talents and associated issues of costuming dictated certain adjustments to the choreographies. Innovations to clothing, such as a higher hemline the better to reveal and display more complex steps and footwork, was one such example.
Watching the accompanying dances by the partnership of Mary and Steven, sometimes solo, sometimes together, their engrossing elegance, their superbly timed and presented varieties of stage business that frequently took a comical turn was simply a delight. The performances were the more convincing throughout the entire programme for being so expertly historically informed.
André Campra (1660-1744) who we also heard from was represented by his ‘L’Europe Galante’ exploring the theme of love in different countries, and after the interval we found Jean-Fery Rebel (1666-1747) a pupil of Lully’s parodying popular dances of the day in his ‘Charactères de la Dance’.
Like Lully, Michel-Richard Delalande (1657-1726) spent a lengthy period at court (40 years) and wrote a number of short pieces as background accompaniment to meals. His ‘Symphonies pour les Soupers du Roy’ were intended for more formal dining and made use of traditional dance models.
In courts and in theatres throughout Europe dance and music were everywhere serving every purpose in these golden years of theatrical choreography. Marin Marais (1656-1728), another of Lully’s students, composed for his own instrument, the viol, and we heard his ‘Les Follies d’Espagne’ (1701), a musical representation of madness, with outstanding viola da gamba player Reiko Ichise as soloist, together with the two dancers, and focusing on an expressiveness at odds with the restraint and control of the French aesthetic that we had experienced in the concert up to this point. Here was a very early example of Romanticism, the movement that, with its own stress on natural emotion and spontaneity, would dominate the later part of the century.
It was a delightful to have this embarrassment of riches brought so vividly to life by AAM with all its usual flair, and by expert students and performers of Baroque dance, inviting us to look ahead to modern dance forms and ballet, and equally to the way in which audiences might be newly able to hear, and musicians to perform, music of the Baroque era.
JOHN GILROY
