This album celebrates dance music, from waltz to tango, from slow foxtrot to quickstep, from samba to jive. Seventy years of music rooted in the 1920s, assembled by the enthusiastic musicians of the Ludwig Orchestra, who have taken to playing them at festivals, alongside their usual programs devoted to Stravinsky or Schoenberg, to get the audience dancing – a phenomenal success story that now becomes an album, Dance with me!

For this project, the Ludwig musicians naturally turned to a partner dear to their hearts, Barbara Hannigan, with whom they recorded Crazy Girl Crazy (Alpha 293), which received a Grammy Award in 2018, in collaboration with composer-arranger Bill Elliott. The trio has reformed here: ‘I was thrilled to go back to this aspect of my musical roots, to reawaken special memories of singing and playing keyboards with a dance band in Nova Scotia’, says Barbara Hannigan. ‘Couples were smiling and dancing to tunes like Moonlight Serenade and In the Mood with a few polkas thrown in towards the end of the evening.’ The Canadian soprano performs four songs, including "I could have danced all night," "Moonlight Serenade," and Kurt Weill’s famous and moving "Youkali."

More musicians round out the guest-list for the party – the trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin-Vary and the Berlage Saxophone Quartet. Dance with me: an invitation to feel happy and light-hearted, quite an achievement these days . . .

REVIEW:

The tautness of the Ludwig Orchestra’s playing – augmented in four dances by the Berlage Saxophone Quartet – echoes that of the best bands of the big band era, and the arrangements are not only effective but cleverly detailed.

-- Gramophone