The Fairy Queen

Les arts florissants, conducted by Paul Agnew; Compagnie Käfig, directed by Mourad Merzouki

Royal Albert Hall: Prom 24

Sometimes a minority art-form can unexpectedly appear centre-stage, and so has hip-hop. This year it was elevated to the status of an official Olympic sport, and that elevation was given an artistic dimension by the French-Algerian choreographer Mourad Merzouki, who took his Käfig dance company to Paris with a break-dance spectacle to mark the Olympic opening. ‘Käfig’ is the Arabic for ‘cage’.

Käfig has now brought to the Proms a very different show. Here their contemporary street-dance artistry was applied to an aristocratic dance-opera which was composed three centuries ago: Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, being a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Crazy or what?

There was nothing defensive about Merzouki’s pre-performance statement. The Fairy Queen, he said, ‘is a promise of wonder, a dream populated by magical beings and intertwining plots’. He promised ‘an unheard-of and fascinating encounter of two artistic forms’. And he also had a social message. He wanted to ‘de-sacralise’ what he saw as the elitism of classical music, by confronting it with popular dance – hip-hop – which is an art-form just as demanding. ‘Bringing these two worlds together,’ he said, ‘is part of our desire to introduce dance and music to as many people as possible.’

The Fairy Queen © Chris Christodoulou

What made this yoking seem improbable is the fact that the sound was to be created by the musicians of Le Jardin des Voix and Les arts florissants, who are royalty in the world of Baroque music. How could such incompatibles meld? All I can say is that after ten minutes I was a helpless convert: lost in admiration for a heady blend of musical beauty, ribald comedy, and preternaturally clever gymnastics which kept me bewitched and delighted for every second of its hundred minutes.

The plot – about nocturnal fun in the land of the fairies – may have been hazy, but who cared? The essence of this show was a non-stop stream of gorgeous songs punctuated by displays of seemingly weightless hip-hop so fast and so preposterous that the eye sometimes couldn’t follow them.

While the period-instrument orchestra under Paul Agnew’s direction set up a warm and mellow sound, the troupe of dancers and the choir of singers – all alike dark-suited – seemed to merge into one playful, sinuously moving mob, in which singers also danced, and dancers intermittently sang.

The evening’s only lacunae lay in the BBC’s presentation. The programme book didn’t include the libretto, and shockingly didn’t attach singers’ names to the exquisite solos they sang. And why on earth was the spectacle not filmed? No sound broadcast will ever convey the magic of this joyfully unique event.