Crowd adulation shows Buchbinder played a blinder
Buchbinder, looking unruffled, but totally off the leash and unusually piratical in his playing. It was a stonking line-up of sonatas (including wee opus 90) that is worth putting under the microscope sometime soon. were times when it felt like he was treading water himself over Reid’s meticulously laid down hip hop beats.
That said, he, Archer and Reid showed something telepathic as bass and drums arrived on some mysterious cue to punctuate the pianist’s extemporising at one point and if Reid’s stickwork was admirable in both timing and tone, the momentum he created with brushes was quite a marvel. Sponsored by the Russian Standard Vodka playing was focused, ballsy and eloquent. Second violinist Loic Rio snapped a string in the finale, but if anything the group’s playing was at its most free and charismatic when they trooped back on to complete the piece, pressure dissipated, string mended and (presumably) coffee kicked in.
Composed in Budapest in the mid-1920s, the Dohnanyi is a gem. The outer movements are gutsy and fresh, propelled by off-kilter rhythmic energy and spirited wit.
The slow movement spins urgent variations around a sweetly wistful chorale theme in which the glossy, elastic Modigliani sound was breathtaking — it’s worth listening back to the BBC Radio 3 broadcast for those chords alone.
That sound was exactly what was needed but never quite emerged before the interval.
Ravel’s String Quartet is nearobligatory repertoire for any young Parisian quartet aiming to strut its pedigree at a major festival debut, but this performance wasn’t the Modiglianis’ best (they have recorded the work along with the Debussy and Saint-Saens quartets; they can do it justice).
The first movement was oddly timid and the pizzicato second movement grew tense as it came unstuck once too often.
The concert opened with Beethoven’s Quartet in C Minor Op 18 no 4, which showed off the beefy if rough-hewn playing of first violinist Philippe Bernhard but needed more intensity from inner parts to really synthesise.
Keith Bruce There appeared to be no liturgical narrative to the appearance of conductor Herve Niquet, his 40 singers and 14 musicians later in the evening at the Edinburgh International Festival, but there was plenty theatre. Most of the instrumentalists processed in from backstage, playing a single note to accompany the plainchant and leading the five choirs of eight singers each.
Arranging themselves in what was an almost complete circle, cello and bass with their backs to auditorium, this was music that was as architecturally pleasing to look at as it was to listen to.
The bulk of it was from the Mass setting of Alessandro Striggio and it was in those that the exchanges between different voices deployed across the five choirs combined in the most various ways.
The compositions of the slightly later Orazio Benevolo, however, showed the chorus at its most robust, Niquet’s singers some distance from the English church tradition, and almost rustic at times.
It was easy to pick out individual voices; “blend” not Niquet’s aim so much as a wide palette of colours.
The intonation was not always flawless – there was a notably wayward soprano moment on the Striggio Credo – and the instrumental flourishes on Benevolo’s Magnificat were not pitch-perfect either, but such are baroque instruments.
When all came together, however, the sound was glorious and ample to fill the hall.
The focus may have been on the recently-hip (rediscovered) Striggio, but Monteverdi’s Psalm of David, with its simpler forces, also beautifully combined the instrumental score and eight-part singing.
As an astute programme note pointed out, it is easier to write simple music in 40 parts, than complex music in four. David Robinson, above, has a Beeb in his bonnet (thank you, Mel, the cheque’s in the post): the 25-year-old singer and blues picker thinks the BBC can do better. He’ll get few arguments there and although some of his notions, such as the BBC harvesting Fringe acts for cheap programmes to replace repeats, might be a bit fanciful, he produces no end of passion and statistics to make his point.
His show is almost a two-for-the-price-of-one deal as his ultimately quite supportive polemic on the BBC is accompanied by and sometimes intersects the musical content, which is good.
He’s a capable fingerpicking and bottleneck style guitarist and his choice of songs, including Howlin’ Wolf’s classic blues Evil and Merle Haggard’s hard-bitten country standard I Can’t Be Myself When I’m With You, can be inspired. Following Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic with his own Hey, in which he voices inarticulate speech of the heart to a Baby Please Don’t Go groove, struck your reviewer as pretty clever. He might not be lining himself up for an appearance on Later With Jools but he deserves an audience. Runs to August 31 ALICE and Harry are proof that if opposites don’t necessarily attract, then they can work well together on a Fringe show. In We Can Make You Happy, Alice plays Julie Andrews with bells on to Harry’s Clement Freud, a man so hang dog he gets all the laughs, and with bribes, poems, insults, compliments, singalongs, and stage invasions they get the audience onside.
It’s actually a rather well written, if also at times a mite cloying, musical of our times, with amusingly well done choreography, smart observations on social media’s functions and drawbacks, and cleverly witty songs. An entertaining hour that will, unless you’re as terminally glum as Harry makes himself out to be, leave you smiling.
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Runs to August 31