Some new mid-seventeenth-century names to absorb. Of these, only Guillaume Dumanoir is at all familiar, even to specialists in the baroque period in France. He was the leader of Louis XIV’s famous “Vingt-quatre violons du roi”, whose main function was to participate in the often sumptuous ballets de cour. Much favoured by the king, he was promoted to “roi des violons”, in charge of some 200 performers and composers; but four years later the ground was cut from under his feet by the establishment of the Academie Royale de Danse under Lully, with whom he became embroiled – even more when, a decade later, Lully founded the Academie Royale de Musique.
The chief sources of the dances by Dumanoir and others of his group, of whom Michel Mazuel was one – these incidentally reveal the extent to which their popularity spread to other countries – are a manuscript in Cassel (intended for the court of the Landgrave of Hesse) and another in Uppsala (for the Swedish court). Courantes and sarabandes were much the most numerous of these dances: gigues are rare, and minuets even more so. But already there was a move away from a basic choreographic character towards stylization (particularly in the allemandes); and the sarabande by the theorist La Voye-Mignot and a remarkably fine, chromatically expressive anonymous lament display a welcome contrapuntal contrast to the prevailing homophony. Some Italian influence is present (as, for example, in fast-speed sarabandes); a pompous F major Overture by Dumanoir foreshadows the later French overture form; and in the Ballet de Stockholm a surprise is an exciting Hungaresca.
Overall this is agreeably melodious music that can easily be imagined as effective in its original balletic context: away from it, the high spots for me were a fetching bourree by Mazuel, the anonymous Fantaisie already mentioned, and the highly entertaining, diversely scored suite for Stockholm. Jordi Savall deserves our thanks for so persuasively presenting, with the accomplished players of the Concert des Nations, this all but unknown repertoire.'