Barbara Hannigan: Dance With Me
Alpha Classics

Ever the provocateur, Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan is as comfortable inhabiting the role of Lulu in Alban Berg's opera as issuing a dance-themed album that includes an orchestral version of—wait for it—Barry Manilow's “Copacabana.” If at first the move appears subversive or even perverse, the evidence at hand reveals she and her musical partners, the Ludwig Orchestra, are wholly sincere in their affection for the material; anyone looking for mockery or irony will have to look elsewhere.

In some ways, Dance With Me is a logical sequel to 2017's Grammy Award-winning Crazy Girl Crazy. Yet whereas the earlier release balanced a lavish Gershwin suite with Berio's Sequenza III and Berg's Lulu Suite, the new set's exclusively devoted to popular dance material; it also continues the collaboration Hannigan, the orchestra, and arranger Bill Elliott began with Crazy Girl Crazy. Note that while the performances are elevated by her vocal presence, she appears on only four of the album's twelve pieces. Elliott is the arranger for half, with Greg Anthony Rassen, Bill Cahn, Edmund Haensch, and Leo Artok credited on the others.

A brief account of how the project came into being's warranted. When the Ludwig Orchestra toured England many years ago, its artistic director Peppie Wiersma popped into a local club after a Birmingham concert and was invigorated by the sight of people dancing to waltzes and foxtrots. That prompted the obtaining of dance band chart booklets and subsequent run-throughs by orchestra members. A tentative set-list gradually formed featuring dance music written between the ‘20s and ‘90s, as did a ballroom band from within the orchestra that would subsequently appear at festivals and events, sometimes after the company's formal evening concert. The desire to document the project with a recording naturally developed, and to that end arrangements were made to enter the studio and bring special guests aboard, trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin-Vary, the Berlage Saxophone Quartet, and, of course, Hannigan.

For the soprano, Dance With Me, recorded at a Hilversum studio in May 2021, presented an opportunity to revisit musical roots, the time early in her career when she sang with a dance band in Nova Scotia and the material dramatically unlike the kind for which she's become known in the concert halls of Europe. No more than a single listen is needed to determine that Hannigan and the orchestra (here in a thirteen-member size) give themselves as completely to Glenn Miller's “Moonlight Serenade” and Lerner and Loewe's “I Could Have Danced All Night” as they would to Ligeti in another context. No sense of slumming arises, and the infectious exuberance of the readings shows the orchestra's as engaged playing ballroom dance charts as contemporary classical. Each track also comes with a particular dance designation, such that Miller's is identified as a slow fox, Manilow's a salsa, and so on.

With Hannigan and the instrumentalists caressing Miller's melodies with controlled sensitivity, the rendition of “Moonlight Serenade” proves entrancing, and she distinguishes the tango-habanera treatment of Kurt Weill's “Youkali” with a suitably impassioned performance. Delivered at high velocity is “Fluffy Ruffles,” a rollicking one-step tune from the ‘20s she sang early in her career with the percussion ensemble Nexus and that's here as much a showcase for xylophonist Niels Meliefste as the singer. Elsewhere, the orchestra gives Robert Stolz's waltz “Je veux t'aimer” a lovely and tender makeover, and its jive version of Winky Malone's “In the Mood” swings sweetly, especially when the Berlage Saxophone Quartet's along for the ride. However one feels about Manilow's “Copacabana,” there's no denying the vitality of the rousing performance and Renaudin-Vary's swinging solo. Artok's graceful slow dance arrangement of Elgar's “Salut d'amour” makes for a stirring exit to the release.

April 2022