Pop goes Purcell: Les Arts Florissants serve up an intoxicating Baroque–Hip-Hop cocktail

It is hard to imagine a more appropriate festival opener than this joyous production of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen by Les Arts Florissants, first seen last year at its director’s home in the west of France. Staged by French-Algerian choreographer, Mourad Merzouki, and featuring dancers of his Compagnie Käfig (and the Juilliard School), with solo singers of Le Jardin des Voix (Les Arts Flo’s sister organisation, co-directed by the legendary William Christie and Paul Agnew), this is a rapturous feast of song, music, dance and acrobatics: as boisterous and engaging a spectacle as one imagines Restoration spectaculars would have been 350 years ago.

Purcell’s ‘semi-opera’ escapes definition or categorisation. Composed for an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but not using the same text, its separate masques and allegorical characters comment on, rather than retell, the story. To perform it as in Purcell’s day alongside the bowdlerised adaptation of the play, even if abridged, would result in an intolerably protracted evening, far beyond the attention span of any modern audience. Without the play, however, the challenge is to link the apparently disparate masques, to create seamless transitions that make a dramatic whole rather than a disparate collection of songs and dances. To have met this challenge so triumphantly was the outstanding achievement of this production, not least thanks to Merzouki’s choreography, which is as continuously inventive and fresh as Purcell’s music.

The musicians were placed at the back of the stage, with William Christie (an avuncular presence, but on great form even as he approaches 80) as the link between the world of instruments and that of singers and dancers. His modest interactions with them were delightful. There was little to separate dancers from singers, at least initially. All were dressed in black suits, loose-fitting for the dancers in what may be a nod to Madonna’s Vogue. In the second half, with its songs for the seasons, jackets were removed to reveal shirts dyed in natural hues, musically echoed by the scrumptious hyper-legatos of the strings.

Stage movement, too, created a natural integration between dancers and singers. The latter, selected by audition for Le Jardin des Voix’s academy, combined freshness and lightness of voice with pinpoint stylistic accuracy, all the while relishing the challenges of choreography and acting. At their most virtuosic, the dancers seamlessly combined elements of modern balletic dance with hip hop and breakdance. The apparent incongruity between Baroque high culture and the street proved enchanting. Done, as here, with the exuberance of youth that permeated the entire performance, it could serve as a model for breaking the boundaries between high- and low-brow cultures.

Occasionally either music or dance were allowed to outshine the other. This was the case during the raunchy “Whence comes my content?”, featuring soprano Paulina Francisco, where the dancer’s head-and-shoulder acrobatic turns elicited gasps and cheers from the audience. And how beautifully music was allowed to take the upper hand during the heart-wrenching plaint “O let me, weep”, gloriously sung by Juliette Mey and accompanied by concertmaster, Emmanuel Resche-Caserta, who quietly stepped from the backstage world of music towards the universal stage of the play in a dialogue of sublime beauty. Elsewhere, downward-drooping instrumental music depicting winter’s slowly creeping in was accompanied by the lowering of a body in crucifix pose, while the final merry rustic ensemble, “They shall be as happy as they are fair”, brought dancers and singers together in a joyous celebration, as they struck playful photogenic poses.

Among comical highlights were the cacophony that signalled the entrance of the drunkard poet (hilariously depicted by Hugo Herman-Wilson), and later the love play between Corydon (again Herman-Wilson) and Mopsa, featuring the delightful Ilja Aksionov in drag (a solution devised by Purcell himself for comic effect).

Masque after masque, there was never a dull moment and the energy level never dropped, even in the quietest and most intimate scenes, such as “No noise”, featuring bass-baritone Benjamin Schilperoort, and the innuendo-ridden “One charming night gives more delights than a hundred lucky days”. The musicians were, as expected, masters of Baroque style, requiring minimal guidance from Christie, but benefitting enormously from his understated appreciation. A special shoutout should go to the recorder players and to Florian Carré and Félix Knecht at the harpsichord and cello continuo.

With its warm wood tones and impeccable acoustics, Koerner Hall is, as a space, perhaps only surpassed by Christie’s own Jardin enchanté in France, where the production was performed last summer in something like the natural habitat of Shakespeare’s play. The production now continues its tour to Quebec, Massachusetts and New York State, before going on to the BBC Proms. Absolutely unmissable.