It was easy to understand why these impassioned performers eventually inspired the audience to dance in harmony with them.
"Don't look like chickens," she cautions, joining them in the dance called "Harmony," swaying to the floor, her arms flowing around her like water.
When the revolution of 1848 crops up, it only serves to make the Austrians look more reassuringly American ("Now we have freedom of speech and a constitution!"), while a virtuoso musical montage sequence set to "The Blue Danube" (an uncredited Josef von Sternberg is said to have directed it) depicts the Eastern Europe through which the river flows as united at dawn in dance and harmony.
The dancers wore adaptations of seventeenth-century dress and danced in harmony with the fountain's arcing progressions, accompanied by Handel and others.
"Like life, this dance has excitement, harmony and internal conflict, which threatens to become self-destruction.
Throughout the program the violinists emphasized spiky harmonies, dance rhythms and strange stillnesses, an approach that was least effective in a stilted performance of Jean-Marie Leclair's Sonata in D (Op. 3, No. 6), composed in 1730.
The follow-up, Main Course (1975), featured ingredients that would soon make the Bee Gees one of the world's biggest acts – dance rhythms, high harmonies, and Barry's remarkable falsetto singing.
Ms. Saariaho occasionally evokes an antique flavor with the struck harp arpeggios of troubadour music, rhythms of medieval dance and modal harmonies tailored to each of the three characters.
As 80s teenagers, the Spice Girls had learnt a great deal from Madonna's wilful, steely and immoveable pop resolve, but they couldn't help being human beings beneath it all - missed dance moves, clunky harmonies, bad hair and all.
This dark collision begins and ends with a daydream of harmony and dance.
