Recording of the Week, Dance With Me from LUDWIG Orchestra and Barbara Hannigan

There can’t be too many ensembles who’d consider following a disc of Grisey, Nono and Haydn with an album which encompasses dances by Barry Manilow, Glenn Miller and Elgar, but LUDWIG Orchestra has never been a group to play safe with its programming. Formed a decade ago in the Netherlands, the ensemble’s philosophy takes its cue from Alban Berg’s remark to an abashed George Gershwin that ‘music is music’ – indeed their 2017 recording of works by both composers was accompanied by a documentary which took that phrase as its title.

This project stirred into life just down the road from Presto HQ, when LUDWIG’s artistic director Peppie Wiersma and a friend were unwinding after a concert in Birmingham and found themselves in a café-bar where the dance-floor was alive with couples foxtrotting and waltzing to their hearts’ content. (As someone who regularly performs in the city I’d love to find out if this place is still in existence, as it sounds distinctly more edifying than our usual post-gig ritual of 2-for-one cocktails and cheesy chips!). Inspired by the happy energy of the occasion, she enlisted her dance-band-playing brother as repertoire consultant and set about assembling a small ensemble from within the ranks of LUDWIG to form a ‘ballroom band’, and over the next few years the group hosted regular soirées alongside the orchestra’s concerts of more standard repertoire.

The 13-strong ensemble have enlisted various charismatic guest artists for the ensuing recording, namely trumpeter Lucienne Rénaudin Vary, the Berlage Saxophone Quartet and Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, who’s previously done double-duty as singer and conductor with LUDWIG. Hannigan (who appears only in her capacity as a vocalist this time round) launches proceedings in fine style with Glenn Miller’s Moonlight Serenade, sung with the same beguiling sensuality which she brings to roles like Berg’s Lulu, and later delivers one of the stand-out performances of the album in the form of George Hamilton Green’s Fluffy Ruffles - an effervescent little one-step about an irresistible flapper, featuring some knock-out xylophone acrobatics from LUDWIG percussionist Niels Meliefste.

She also contributes a biting account of Kurt Weill’s tango-habanera Youkali (by some margin the darkest track on the album), and a ravishing ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ from My Fair Lady, here elongated into a louche waltz where the hyperactive energy of the original is replaced by laid-back voluptuousness. (If anyone wants to cast Hannigan as Eliza Doolittle in the near future, however, I’m sure I won’t be the only person to salivate at the prospect…).

Momentum never sags, though, when the star attraction is off-stage: Rénaudin Vary steps into the spotlight with infectious brio for Manilow’s evergreen Copacabana, riffing joyously over Greg Anthony Rassen’s colourful tapestry of bongos and deliciously slippery strings, and the sax quartet really come into their own in his glorious technicolour arrangement of the Lambada popularised by Koanga (though originally written by Bolivian folk group Los Kjarkas) in the late 1980s. Robert Stolz’s lovely ‘English Waltz’ Je veux t’aimer provides a welcome breather at around the half-way mark, and a rapt, gently swooning performance of Elgar’s Salut d’Amour (just one of many tracks which showcase the gorgeous vintage sound of leader Nadia Wijzenbeek) brings the revels to a ravishing close.

My sole reservation about this album is that there isn’t more of it – at 47 minutes, there’s surely room for a couple more turns around the dance-floor, though the energy-levels are so high throughout that it seems a bit churlish to feel short-changed. Hannigan completists will need no persuading on this one despite her relatively slight involvement, but I defy anyone not to be swept along by the sheer joie de vivre of the entire project – although the cabin-feverish ‘kitchen-discos’ of 2020 may now be little more than a vaguely dystopian memory, even those who instinctively recoil from the clichéd invitation to ‘dance like no-one is watching’ may find themselves doing exactly that after sampling a couple of tracks…