Violin, My Dancing Queen

Norwich Baroque is delighted to welcome the Neue Hofkapelle Graz (directed from the violin by Lucia Froihofer) to Norwich for a dance-around-the-world programme combining French Baroque dance suites with the folk music of Austria and the British Isles.

At the core of the programme lies the juxtaposition of Rebel’s Les caracteres de la danse, a whirlwind tour of courtly French dance forms and styles, with Lucia’s counter-suite of Styrian folk dances, Charaktere der steirischen Tänze. François Couperin’s Les Nations reflects this syncretism of dance music back into the 18th-century project of uniting (or reuniting) the dominant musical styles of France and Italy, exemplified here through Couperin’s admiration for Jean-Baptiste Lully and Arcangelo Corelli.

Looking westward, Les Sauvages from Rameau’s Les Indes galantes blends courtly French dance forms with the earthy nobility of Native Americans as they existed in the 18th-century French imagination – fuelled by an Enlightenment philosophy that saw goodness and dignity at the core of who we are as humans.

Jim O’Toole’s charismatic arrangements of folk tunes and early dance music from the British Isles round out the picture, including his wildly popular Lord Kelly’s Catharsis, a mashup of the 18th-century English Lord Kelly’s Reel with Catharsis, a modern Irish-style reel by Vermont-based fiddler Amy Cann.

The programme plays with the dichotomies of high and low, here and there, and then and now, all of which melt easily away in the overpowering human impulse to dance.