Alle Menschen werden Brüder

(oder Schwester)*

What a revelation! Our performance with the Bonn youth big band at the town hall this evening was just the beginning of a whole evening of enthusiastic collaboration. I'd planned to slink away after our performance and was so glad I didn't. Apparently there are 200 people from Bonn in Oxford this weekend, many of them performers. The Bonn Saxophone Ensemble played and the Oxford Fiddle Group played back. Bonn's Reel Bach Consort built their very funny performance around the conceit of Bach visiting Ireland and his collaboration with Turlough O'Carolan. In an extended musical joke they meld music from both composers and play Bach on Irish instruments.

The dance company from Oxford's Pegasus Youth Theatre showed us an astonishing energetic dance they've created and they were followed by the Bonn Irish Dance Group's foot-stampingly rousing performance.

The best, absolutely the best bit of an unexpectedly good evening was when we were packing up to leave and one of the Oxford dancers asked one of the Bonn dancers to teach him Irish step dancing. The photo's not technically great but, as you can see, I'm not the only one entranced by the magic of this international tangling.

*'All men will be brothers' - a line from Friedrich Schiller's poem Ode an die Freude (Ode to Joy) set to music in Beethoven's 9th symphony and now Europe's aspirational anthem.
('oder schwester' (or sisters) is my addition, but I'm sure you'd already guessed that.)