A thread of fascinating partnerships between music and movement runs through the 78th Edinburgh international festival, with circus skills meeting Gluck in Orpheus and Eurydice and puppetry realising Huang Ruo’s Book of Mountains and Seas. The final week has brought Kim Brandstrup and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the culmination of the choreographer’s project to bring the music of JS Bach to young people through dance.
A small edition of the OAE, with 18 strings, three winds and keyboard, led by Margaret Faultless, was raised above the Usher Hall stage, transformed, with mirrored floor and back wall and benches to the side, into something like a shiny school gym. And it was indeed in a north London high school, where the orchestra is resident, that the larger works took shape, Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins and Brandenburg Concerto No 3 uniting the breakdancing skills of the young people and professional dancers already familiar with Brandstrup’s vocabulary.
His instinct that the fusion would animate 300-year-old music is thrillingly justified, but it does place huge demands on the instrumentalists, who initially sounded a little insipid in Edinburgh’s big hall until the discreet amplification properly kicked in. This was necessarily “strict time” Bach, with no room for the improvisatory freedom expected in early music performance, and often all the better for that. The rigorous beat made familiar music new, and it was a more relaxed band that played the instrumental interludes between the choreography.
Music from the Solo Cello Suites, played by Andrew Skidmore, soundtracked a trio and two solos, the last of them daringly slow but still recognisably hip-hop in its shapes. Those and much of the frontline precision were performed by regular Brandstrup associates including Tommy Franzen, Deavion Brown, Aurora Casatori and Elyse Renwick-Ashun. But it was the full ensemble work, where it was often impossible – and irrelevant – to distinguish between those dancers and the young recruits, that was most exciting, particularly the Brandenburg finale.
Bean-bag seating in the stalls, the Usher Hall was packed to the rafters, with many young people in the audience for this one-night-only premiere. It was not perfect, with even the professional dancers sometimes out of position, but it was already exhilarating – and has the potential to be breathtaking.
