There dances the angel bear

It was a performance that told of approachability and aloofness, of the mutual understanding between social spheres and their different kinds of music. An evening full of wit and emotion. Held in Berlin's Radialsystem and devised by the Academy for Ancient Music Berlin and the theatre troupe Nico and the Navigators, the show really does end with whisky for everyone. “Dance, people”, cries Gillott over the Scottish fiddle music. The poetry of the evening, dreamt up by Nicola Hümpel, descends into revelry. You really have to see for yourself the way Gillott fashions himself a set of bagpipes out of an enormous air cushion together with a hose and organ pipe, then throws himself on the cushion just like “Goethe in the Roman Campagna” in Tischbein's painting, opens the valve and thereupon releases the whistling sound of Henry Purcell's “Fantasia Upon One Note”. Then there is his hilarious declamation, in an imperious teacher's tone, of the text from Handel's “Esther” as Gioanna Pessi is tuning her harp: “Tune your harps to cheerful strains, moulder idols into dust.” Zeitfenster, the biennial for Ancient Music, put on by the Konzerthaus Berlin, could hardly have chosen a better way to finish.