Nicolette Moonen’s Bach Players join hands with Riccardo Barros’s Mercurius Company to present a concert that embodies the European idea in music and dance. Musicians have always travelled, both in mind and in body, and this programme will take you on a journey across the Continent: from Russia and Turkey, through Switzerland, Italy, France, and on to Spain and Portugal. Our performers come from Brazil, Britain, Germany, Austria, France and the Netherlands. The music will be both played and danced to, providing an enjoyable reminder that dance was fundamental to music in the baroque period, and part of the fabric of everyday life then. Telemann’s suite ‘Les Nations’, in which the characters of European countries are depicted in music, is followed by Rebel’s Les Caractères de la danse: a compendium of the main dance forms of the period, performed by Riccardo Barros. Vivaldi’s passionate and hugely popular set of variations on ‘La Folia’ takes on fresh meanings when danced out. The concert concludes with Telemann’s ‘burlesque’ of Don Quixotte. The Spanish nobleman of Cervantes’s novel lives in an imaginary world in which he chases windmills and hankers after sweet Dulcinée. He prefers his fantasies to the reality of the world: a fable for the times in which we live? The concert will be presented in the round, in the main body of the hall, and can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

Participants in the morning’s workshop receive 10% off tickets to this concert when booked in the same transaction.
thebachplayers.org.uk
mercuriuscompany.co.uk