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.
