Excellence from Cummings and the Academy of Ancient Music – but does the King really dance?

Most of the audience at Milton Court last night will have known that music and dance were at the heart of the court of King Louis XIV at Versailles; many will have seen David Bintley’s ballet The King Dances or dramas such as Versailles or Le roi danse, which show that Louis himself was an expert dancer who used dance spectaculars as a diplomatic tool. But few, I fancy, will have seen the music of Lully and other court composers combined with an authentic reconstruction of the dance forms of the day, which made last night’s concert an intriguing concept. In the event, the evening was a huge success musically, with the dance elements more questionable.

With some 16 musicians of the Academy of Ancient Music awaiting him, Laurence Cummings cut an impressive figure as he strode onto the stage to the strains of a ceremonial march from Lully’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, stamping a staff taller than himself on the floor in time to the music, the conducting method used in those days (which proved the death of Lully from gangrene after he struck his own foot by mistake).

Immediately, the sheer beauty of the AAM’s sound palette became evident, and it remained so throughout the concert. The sound of Baroque strings and continuo is a familiar one, but several things stood out. The sound of every woodwind instrument – two oboes, two flutes, two bassoons – was rich and full of character, without ever attempting to call attention to itself above the rest of the ensemble. Percussionist Rachel Gledhill made a particular impression, sometimes driving a whole piece, as was the case for the marches, sometimes filling out the texture. Cummings kept an impeccable balance throughout, allowing us to revel in the wealth of this sound world.

With the opening over, Cummings also proved an adept compère, hamming up his introductions and narrations for Céphale et Procris, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s only opera, with exaggerated pomp. The music was engaging throughout, giving us a clear sense of the rather paradoxical aesthetic in which Arcadian rusticity meets the grandeur of royalty and gods.

The different dances for these different moods are indeed part of the experience, and Mary Collins and Steven Player, dressed in a variety of costumes, gave a spirited effort showing dance moves of the day. But the dance component of the evening fell very much between two stools. On the one hand, it wasn’t a workshop in which the different forms were being demonstrated and explained to us. But it also wasn’t a great dance performance in itself: movements were insufficiently crisp, the choreography insufficiently exciting, the visual gags insufficiently funny to add any sense of thrill.

The second half was more focused on the music, with the AAM playing out of their skins in suites from Jean-Féry Rebel and Michel-Richard Delalande, Cummings’ right hand appearing to sculpt the music out of clay. The excitement reached its peak for the last piece, as the musicians were joined by Riko Ichise on viola da gamba, who showed extraordinary virtuosity in a mash-up of Marin Marais’ Les Folies d’Espagne with related music by Francesco Geminiani.

As a concert, this was an evening to savour. As a show, it was perhaps overambitious: pleasant a concert hall as it is, Milton Court isn’t exactly Versailles, so creating a proper sense of occasion for Louis XIV’s dances was probably an impossible task.