The Baroque foundations of Europop?

Until the August release of Asya Fateyeva and the Lautten Compagney Berlin’s Dancing Queen: Rameau Meets ABBA (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi), a saxophone-meets-Baroque-ensemble affair, neither Rameau nor ABBA looked to figure large in discussions of the year in music.

Then, in October, ABBA released The Singles: The First 50 Years (Polar), and several weeks later, critic Ted Gioia understandably numbered the Finnish classical accordionist Janne Valkeajoki’s entrancingly fluttery Rameau (Orchid Classics) among the best 100 albums of the year. Suddenly, trying to discover whether the esteemed French Baroque composer could illuminate Sweden’s No. 1 pop-­cultural export or vice versa didn’t seem like all that silly a way to spend a week.

Or more. After all, it takes nearly five hours to cycle through the ABBA, the Fateyeva, and the Valkeajoki albums once—5½ if you append the piano performance of Rameau’s Suite en La Mineur with which the pianist Jean-Paul Pruna concludes his Suites: Hommage á Marcelle Meyer (Editions Hortus). May as well. It’s the newest of the bunch and good too.

The point is that although you can get through these recordings three times a day if you have nothing else to do, you do have other things to do, such as verifying that ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus weren’t shaped by the French Baroque at all but by folk, and that any similarity between their music and the classics is purely coincidental.

Dancing Queen: Rameau Meets ABBA Asya Fateyeva, Lautten Compagney Berlin

On Dancing Queen, the yoking of Rameau and ABBA sometimes comes off unequal. Merely having the Lautten Compagney play “Take a Chance on Me,” “Waterloo,” and the title cut on early-­music instruments while transferring the melodies to Fateyeva’s saxophone doesn’t magically transform the songs into something resembling what Rameau, with his commitment to what the musicologist Cuthbert Girdlestone calls “exquisitely lyrical” themes, would invent.

At other times, however, the juxtaposition works. The two halves of the ABBA-Rameau medleys “Lay All Your Love on Me/Loure Grave” (from the opera-ballet Les Fêtes d’Hébé) and “Money, Money, Money/Tambourin” (ditto) flow into each other with a centuries-spanning continuity. And by transposing “Mamma Mia” into a minor key, the Lautten cellist Bo Wiget manages a similar effect within the boundaries of a single song.

But if the majority of the Andersson-Ulvaeus compositions on Dancing Queen lack affinities with Rameau, many of the 12 non-medleyed Rameau pieces have affinities with ABBA, or at least with the latter-day, dramatically mature ABBA. (Take “Entree de Polymnie” from Les Boréades, for instance.) So while it’s hard to imagine Andersson and Ulvaeus surviving as composers during the 18th century, it is possible, and rather pleasant, to fantasize how—and that—pop could’ve been made richer by Rameau.