To some extent I was still basking in the glory of last night’s real tennis match, in which I had played a small but decisive part in the MCC’s recovery from near defeat to eventual victory against Middlesex University by three rubbers to two. In truth it was the incredibly exciting fourth rubber which turned the contest – our pair had some five match points against them in their rubber before turning it around. I played in the deciding fifth rubber.
The original plan for this SJSS lunchtime concert had been to go with John Random, but he had to pull out of this one. So I even considered missing out myself.
Wild Gypsy fiddling, Jewish and Greek music, and tango, alongside interpretations of Japanese, Polish and Sephardic songs…
…was just what I needed before going to the office on a Thursday afternoon. Not least because we have just returned from Japan, where we came across very little actual Japanese music…
Anyway, I’m very glad I made the decision to go to SJSS that lunchtime and see the Kosmos Ensemble perform.
They are three very talented young musicians who met while studying at the Royal Academy of Music and formed this ensemble as a vehicle for their shared interest in world music.
Actually I don’t think we got any “Sephardic Songs” as promised, but we did instead get a Serbian lament and some Scandinavian music, plus even some Scottish and English themed music.
Some pieces worked better to my ears than others – one or two of the pieces inserted phrases from well-known works at a level of subtlety that might even make PDQ Bach blush. I sense that all three of them are most at home with Eastern-European melodies and rhythms – but their virtuosity and curiosity help compensate for those elements of the programme that were not quite to my taste – I pretty much enjoyed the whole set.
For me the highlights were:
the Japanese-style piece Sakura (Cherry Blossom):
a version of Piazolla’s Libertango with a sort-of Klezmer cadenza at the end, which they have nicknamed “Liberklezmango”:
All three of the musicians: Harriet Mackenzie, Meg-Rosaleen Hamilton and Miloš Milivojević are clearly embarking on highly successful careers and I wish them well individually and as an ensemble.
…and (perhaps less plausibly) I did claim another world record as a child, along with Paul Deacon, recorded for all posterity in my diary. This earlier claim has caused some controversy amongst the Alleyn’s School alumni:
So, when my business partner, Michael Mainelli, announced that, in his capacity as Master of the World Traders, he had decreed that the Guiness World Record for the most nationalities simultaneously singing a pop song was to be broken on his watch, I thought I should lend my considerable experience of world-record breaking to the enterprise. Especially as part of the purpose was to raise some money for charity.
Michael, looking masterfully iconoclastic
The world-record attempt was to be made in conjunction with Goodenough College (a wise and practical move given the size of the college’s hall and its international residency characteristics).
The extant record is (was) 72 nationalities, which doesn’t sound difficult to beat until you try.
My attempts to coerce some of the rarer nationalities to Bloomsbury on the promise of refreshments and a chance to be a record breaker had very limited success.
However, I did turn up myself in my capacity as an Estonian E-Resident as well as a UK national. Whether my E-Residency will count or not is in the hands of the official authenticators. It is on a short list of “others” which might or might not count. But we believe we have kicked the extant record deep into touch even if none of the “others” are accepted. .. (Update: the e-residency didn’t count – but my attendance still counts of course).
Yo!
The first part of the evening was a bit like trying to get through immigration at Heathrow after our beloved Prime Minister has had her bureaucratic way with Brexit. Everyone needed to register, have their nationality documents copied, witnessed, verified…
…only then could you complete the maze and enter the large hall where the sing-along took place.
…but without the chairs
Even then, we were all put through a further confirming, counting and segmenting into bite-sized zones to enable stewards and witnesses to confirm that we were all singing. We had over 200 people singing, representing up to 87 nationalities (including the three or four odd-bods like me) – well north of the previous record of 72.
But, despite the bureaucracy, it proved to be a great fun evening. There were lots of people I know there and I got to meet some new people too.
The choir-mistress got us to do some excellent warming up exercises to ensure that our minds, bodies and lungs were all to be working at full pelt when we went for the record.
Warming Up – photo borrowed from the World Traders Tweet
I was at the far end of the room – you can probably see three or four pixels of me in the above photo.
Then we practiced by singing “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing”. I remember, even as a small child, finding that song cheesy. Yet it still turns out to be even cheesier than I remembered it:
https://youtu.be/8jr9hPbYmBo
Then we warmed up some more with Mamma Mia – another cheesy song but one with more communal fun singing characteristics:
https://youtu.be/LO3bos8WVD0
But the actual world-record attempt song was Imagine, which we practiced once and then sang in full, even repeating the third verse to make absolutely sure that we exceeded three minutes, a required factor for our record it seems:
https://youtu.be/VOgFZfRVaww
Actually, when we performed Imagine the second time – i.e. for the formal record-breaking attempt, it was a very moving experience. I think we all felt a sense of international cameradie and in the end we linked arms and swayed to the rhythm of our singing.
After the record attempt, the choir-mistress led us in another Mamma Mia to let off steam.
Then drinks. Plenty of them.
There were rumours on the night that a commercial enterprise was going to trying to break the very same record the next night. Indeed they sent some spies who tried to recruit singers from our event, which felt a bit sleazy to me. Anyway, word is, that those chancers only reached the 72 previously achieved and that our record should be confirmed.
We should learn quickly if/that our effort has been confirmed as a new world record. We ‘re quietly confident. I’ll update this posting once we know. Until then, you’ll have to imagine.
But back to the here and now – this 2018 lunchtime concert. This is one of those BBC lunchtime jobbies, so we were in the extremely capable hands of Sara Mohr-Pietsch. Sara stewards these lunchtime concerts with such gentle, kind authority and efficiency, it makes one wonder whether she should be running the country. I suppose the country is a slightly tougher gig, but it could sure use some of the positive characteristics I have just described.
I have previously introduced Trio Mediæval as the Bananarama of mediaeval girl groups. Much like that 1980s pop trio, Trio Mediæval (a product of the 1990s as it happens) seems to have two stable members plus one newbie each time we see them.
The consistent pair are Anna Maria Friman (from Sweden) and Linn Andrea Fuglseth (from Norway), whereas the newbie this time was Jorunn Lovise Husan.
If Anna Maria and Linn Andrea were to pair up with a couple of Swedish blokes, I could start describing them as the Abba of mediaeval vocal music, which might be an even more marketing-friendly epithet. A thought for the girls to ponder, no doubt.
And thoughtful they are. They sing with smiles on their faces. They sing like people who absolutely know and love what they are doing. You sense that there is deep scholarship about mediaeval music in their work, yet also the willingness to adapt, experiment and make the music accessible to modern audiences.
This concert was a mixture of early English chants and motets, plus traditional folk songs from Norway and Sweden. It reads like an odd mix but actually worked very well. It has, each previous time, been a joy to attend their concerts and this one was certainly no exception.
Lulled into a blissful sense of security, Janie lulled me into a gentleman’s outfitters afterwards, helping me to spend far too much money upgrading my rather tired wardrobe. Anyone fancy some second hand jackets and trousers from the Bananarama and/or Abba era?
I can’t really explain why this concert didn’t really float our boat – it just didn’t. Janie and I were both feeling unusually tired that early evening – both short of energy for venturing out. We had been enjoying following the cricket and tennis over the weekend, the latter until reasonably late I suppose, but that wouldn’t normally put us off.
La Serenissima is an unusually large troupe for the Wigmore Hall – there as a lot of juggling and jiggling to fit everyone on the stage, so it all felt a bit busy.
The chorus missed their cue to enter right at the start of the performance, which led to more jiggling for stage space after the orchestra had prepared themselves spatially and tuned their instruments.
The concert was all music from the Imperial Court of Charles VI
I wanted to hear Caldara live as I had never heard any before. I rather liked his arias, actually. Quite beautiful.
But I knew the Conti comic opera material would not please Janie – nor did it much please me. In truth, the whole concert was a bit busy and noisy for us that night.
Come the interval, when we realised that the only substantially different piece on the schedule was a Vivaldi concerto, lovely though the RV171 undoubtedly is, we decided to make an early exit. Here is Europa Gallant’s delightful recording, with Fabio Biondi on the fiddle:
The following is La Serenissima playing Caldara, but a sinfonia, not an aria – beautiful it is, though:
…and finally here is a Caldara aria, performed by Concerto Köln under Emmanuelle Haïm with the superb Philippe Jaroussky singing the aria.
The weather really has mostly smiled on us for this visit to Edinburgh and in a way this day was no exception. Although it was drizzling hard in the morning, preventing us from playing tennis, the forecast said that the day would brighten up for our festival visit; which it did.
So we stayed home in the morning, making the most of the flat and having a cooked breakfast at home, using up some of the provisions we had bought in for hunkering-down purposes.
After brunch, off to town to collect tickets and then get to our first show of the day; Vessel at Bristo Square. Vessel is an excellent two-hander, performed by the writer, Laura Wyatt O’Keefe together with a fine young actor, Edward Degaetano, whom we bumped into and chatted with briefly after the performance.
We thought this piece, about the abortion debate in Ireland and the effect the strong views on the issue can have on real women’s choices/lives, was a really excellent short play. It deserves a wider airing and it was a real shame that the auditorium was not full.
Our next show was at the Teviot with just over an hour between shows; plenty of time to pop across the way to Checkpoint for some reasonably refined refreshment and for me to start getting interested in the Middlesex score as the chance of a highly unlikely win started to emerge.
On to the Teviot (what a grand looking Students’ Union that place is!) to see Sitting by Katherine Parkinson. This auditorium was full; probably because the play is by a known actress and had some exposure on the BBC. In truth, this was a rather contrived piece of writing about three life model sitters, apparently unconnected (although naturally connections emerge) and their relationship with an unseen and unheard artist.
The performers; James Alexandrou, Grace Hogg-Robinson and Hayley Jayne Standing all did their best to rescue the rather slow, tame and at times predictable script. The audience whopped and applauded wildly at the end; perhaps because the BBC had endorsed the production…or perhaps it was one of the better things that many in the audience had seen.
We emerged from that experience feeling a little irritated that, of the two things we had seen today, the production with bigger names behind it was getting the bigger audience and plaudits, despite being the lesser production in our view.
Irritation that Middlesex still needed a wicket to secure a win turned to joy at that win, before we moved on to have a stroll across town…
Then we wandered around Charlotte Square for a while looking at the Book Festival and taking an ice cream in the sunshine.
Then on to the Royal Botanical Gardens for some more irritation as we were told that we couldn’t see the garden ahead of our 19:00 concert there; we would have to walk all the way round the outside from the East Gate (where the fringe app had sent us) to the West Gate. This seemed ludicrously jobsworth-like to me during the weeks of festival if the gardens choose to play host to a venue. Being told that we weren’t the first to voice this grievance did not make us feel better.
I snapped some genuinely dire cricket in Inverleith Park across the road while we waited for the Gardens to let the #Pianodrome Live audience in.
The Pianodrome itself is a fascinating piece of construction, made from 50 recycled pianos, five of which can still be played within the venue. It seats about 50 people reasonably comfortably and another 50 uncomfortably. We had made sure to get there early to get relatively comfortable seating.
A young woman in Edwardian drag with an infeasibly waxy false-tash acted as compère quite well.
Janie and I already knew that we were to see a folk musician named Sam Gillespie (one half of The Brothers Gillespie) as a substitute for a prog rock band named The Brackish and were quite happy with the swap. He was joined by Siannie Moodie who turned out to be an especially fine exponent of the Celtic harp (clàrsach). In fact they both turned out to be good instrumentalists but my goodness Sam Gillespie’s songs are dirgy and derivative. Imagine Donovan and Pete Seeger, both in a bad mood, writing songs together.
Meanwhile additional people entered late (we guessed mostly the entourage of the substitute musicians) and some of them sat just under our feet. One young man who was clearly in with the in crowd made an especially redolent impression on us. What is it about people who hang around musicians and negligence with regard to personal hygiene?
There was also another musician involved briefly who played a glockenspiel-type percussion instrument but whose name seemed to be unlisted. Janie had unwittingly snapped him during warm up, so if anyone reading this recognises this man and his instrument, please message in his details.
The act for the second half of the evening was also unlisted and the compère merely mumbled that name as we left for the interval; in our case not to return.
We fancied a nice dinner tonight and felt that we could get one of those if we were back in Leith at a reasonable hour, so I made a last minute booking of a table at The Chop House for another good red meat meal.
Again Ignascio looked after us very nicely as did the very sweet and attentive (if not the most efficient) waiting staff. One young waiter, on his third day, took a particular interest in helping us out with ice cream, so I invented a word for the equivalent of a sommelier for ice cream: Ísbíltúrier. Remember where you encountered the word first.
The weather was much improved again today; yesterday was a weather blip. So we played tennis again at Leith Links in the morning.
Then off to have lunch at Marie and Joe’s new apartment in the south of Edinburgh, not too far from Summerhall and The Meadows. It took just over 45 minutes to get there door to door with a change of bus.
Janie insisted on taking some pictures along the way
We had a guided tour of the new place, including the new kitchen and en suite bathroom, which we were thus seeing before Linda Cook gets to see them; which is sure to be a source of much consternation.
Joe cooked a rather wonderful fish pie as the centrepiece of the lunch. We had a cherry roularde and some cheeses to follow, so that was us pretty much sorted for food today. Nice wines too.
It was really good to see Marie and Joe in their new home environment; when I saw them in Edinburgh last year…
We had some very interesting conversation about the festival, Edinburgh generally, politics generally, death, siblings, niblings, isms and anti-isms. You get the idea.
When lunch came to a natural end, I announced that I wanted to seek some indoor tennis shoes from Bruntsfield Sports in Morningside on our way back to Edinburgh. Marie and Joe volunteered to walk off lunch with us and chat some more.
It turned out that Bruntsfield Sports in Morningside doesn’t do those shoes; it is their branch at David Lloyd that sells them.
Still, we were by then near a convenient bus stop for central Edinburgh, so said a fond goodbye to Marie & Joe while stepping onto a bus to Princes Street.
We sought out the Apple Store on Princes Street in a vain attempt to get Daisy’s iPhone re-batteried (takes hours, we’ll need to do that in London). But I did procure the very iPad keyboard upon which I am typing right now, which should make my travelling blogs easier to write (i.e. wordier) in future.
On the way to Apple I spotted a show, Let’s Talk About Porn, at C, which looked interesting; a troupe of youngsters and plenty of time to faff around at Apple. Once I realised that’s we needed very little faffing time at Apple, I spotted another performance, The Roots Of The Blues, near to the C show (theSpaceTriplex) and just about enough time to pick up the tickets and fit both shows in.
So we ended up doing the very thing we promised we wouldn’t do; ran around like mad things fitting in a couple of shows at near-breakneck pace.
Both shows were worth it. The Roots Of The Blues was a mix of lecture and performance by Toby Mottershead. Charming, informative and he’s also a very able guitar player/blues singer. Toby’s slide guitar playing was exceptional and a new live experience for me and Janie.
Then up to C for the play Let’s Talk About Porn. This was a verbatim theatre piece, performed in a physical style by a very young troupe. “Sadly” we didn’t see the dour bar-tenders at the upstairs bar, but we did grab some water and did see the Flamenco duo from the previous evening sitting around before and after the play.
The play was good; we’d seen a fair bit of material on this topic before but it was an innovative, thoughtful, physical and interesting piece.
Then home, where we fancied little food and no booze – so we relaxed with just some toast and juice. Daisy managed to set off the smoke alarm by burning some toast – mercifully those things switch them selves off quite quickly and it was still reasonably early when that happened!
The promised deluge mostly dumped its load overnight, leaving a drizzly, mizzly morning.
We’d already rescheduled the Falkland Palace/real tennis outing to Tuesday and/but there was no hope of modern tennis either in the murk, so we had a very pleasent, quiet morning hunkered down with our provisions.
We watched the start of the test match while grazing, then set off to the City to collect our tickets…
…and then go out to Summerhall. There we saw A Fortunate Man, a two-handed play adapted from the book about a rural GP, in the rather apt setting of a former veterinary college lecture theatre. It was a very moving piece.
Then on to Flamenco Global at C. This had been a more serendipitous choice; I simply wanted to find some music (for variety) at that hour when we found that we couldn’t get tickets for Extinguished Things.
We had a glass of wine at the bar before the show, served by the most disengaged, humourless young people we have so far encountered in Edinburgh, which, together with the rather dour queue management at C, didn’t seem to auger well.
But as it turned out, Flamenco Global was a stunningly good act. Ricardo Garcia is a superb and seemingly very sweet guitarist. His playing was accompanied by some fine dancing by Nanako Aramaki.
We chatted afterwards with a nice Scottish couple who were fans of Flamenco and of Garcia in particular.
Then the bus home…
…for a quick freshen up and then off to the Roseleaf for dinner.
Great grub and friendly staff. daisy started with satay prawns & went on to a chunky Cullen Skink (a sort of smoked haddock chowder), while I started with an excellent mushroom soup followed by a trout dish. A fruity Viognier wine. We even had deserts – Janie had affogato (all the fashion I am told) while I tried a banana parfait with ice cream & chocolate named Bananarama.
All the music was similarly late 1970s early 1980s with various retro feels in the crockery and a collection of mad hats around the walls for mad hatter tea parties, apparently. For a short while we had a strange couple next to us – she had no volume control, occasionally speaking so loudly and strangely it was hard nor to look. They ate incredibly quickly and mercifully moved on at pace too.
Quirky place, superb food, excellent service, rounded off our day very nicely.
I turned up to play him in the morning. On arrival he greets me with the phrase:
I ran into someone who knows you the other day. Knows you from the gym or something. When real tennis came up in the conversation, he asked if I knew you.
But the really strange coincidence about that encounter was that, John told me, it was at Grace Road, Leicester, at a Cricket Society bash…
…do you mean day two of the Leicestershire v Middlesex match?…
John and I fought out a tough, some would say bitter, battle, which ended in a draw, once the nonagenarians, who were next on court, separated us combatants who, by that time, were (naturally) screaming, punching, wrestling and biting. It’s a gentleman’s game, real tennis. In fact, I stayed on for the nonagenarian doubles that day and almost managed to keep up with the oppo for an additional hour.
Later that day, once I had recovered from two hours of combat (and done a spot of work), Janie and I took dinner at Delamina in Marylebone, ahead of a rather unusual-looking late night concert at the Wigmore Hall.
We thought the food in Delamina was superb – I had a seriously posh kofta dish while Janie had a seriously posh take on turkey shawarma – but the place was very noisy on a Friday evening and the service, while admittedly delivered by universally sweet staff, was poor.
We stretched our legs and got a chance to have a conversation that we both could hear, by walking the long way round to the Wigmore Hall. While strolling, I told Janie about the strange coincidence that John Thirlwell (whom she had met at the Middlesex University Real Tennis match) had been in the next room to me all day at Leicester.
Before entering the concert hall itself, I popped to the Wigmore Hall loo. There I saw a gentleman who looked remarkably like John Thirlwell. No, he wasn’t a gentleman who looked a lot like John Thirlwell; it WAS John Thirlwell.
“This is bonkers”, I said, “you’re blooming everywhere” – to which John could only smile and agree. Thus Janie and I chatted with John and his charming companion Maggie before and briefly after the concert. John is not a Wigmore Hall regular – he had simply seen this concert listed and thought it looked interesting and different.
I often say that Lord’s and the Wigmore Hall are the last remaining places where I get addressed as “young man”. I wonder whether that sort of thing was the causal link for John Thirlwell visiting both places on the same day as me. Joking apart about fierce combat; it turns out that John is actually jolly good company, both on the tennis court (which I knew already) and also in the concert hall.
A collaboration much like the fusions in Delamina’s food, now I come to think of it.
Here is one of the pieces, from the latest David Orlowsky Trio album, which they played for us at the Wig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrDBrUkv0Qw
Or try this tiddler, which the Wig used to promote the concert we attended:
We thought the music was wonderful fun; a mixture of smooth jazz and the sort of dance rhythms that central and eastern European music does so well, not least when klezmerised.
Janie and I sat next to an aficionado of the group who told us, sadly, that the trio is due to split soon after a mere 20 years together. Perhaps they feel it is time to pursue other projects. They are all virtuoso musicians; David Orlowsky himself utterly exceptional on the clarinet but really all three were excellent.
Quite a day; I hope John Thrilwell enjoyed his day as much as I enjoyed mine.
…still refer to me as “young man”: Lord’s and the Wigmore Hall.
Janie and I ended up going to both of those places on the same day, but sadly, no-one referred to me as “young man” in either place. Perhaps our mistake, in this regard, at Lord’s, was to take the youngsters, Charlie and Chris (Lavender & Escamillo Escapillo), as our guests. These terms are comparative, after all. In other regards, however, this was not a mistake, because we all four had a most enjoyable day at Lord’s.
Janie and I got to Lord’s really early, to secure enough seats in Janie’s favourite pavilion spot; the upper sun deck. And in order to achieve that, we both got up ridiculously early. Janie was on picnic duty for this one – never a quick and dirty process in the morning however much preparation can be done the day before.
Janie had sourced quite a lot of the food (and indeed other weekend food) at Finn’s – which seemed most appropriate with Steve Finn skippering Middlesex for this match.
Steve Finn congratulating Max Holden for his fine bowling. Holden can bowl – who knew? Image embedded from Middlesex CCC Website
So the picnic basically comprised some cheesy biscuit nibbles, ham rolls, sweet nibbles, beef rolls, carrots, tomatoes and grapes. A bottle of Vouvray and a bottle of Pinot Noir. Yummy.
Our little group got quite jolly and at one point there was a round of hat swapping, which left Chris looking a little unusual in Janie’s big colourful floppy sun hat. I primed my camera for a photo, but Chris felt that, as I am a captain of industry, it would be best not to have a permanent record that showed me to have been in Chris’s company…or something like that.
A suitably sensible-looking photo
The occasion was, in part, timed to coincide with Chris’s birthday. He mumbled about producing a birthday honours list, on the basis that, if the queen could have such lists, why couldn’t he?
Meanwhile Charlie (the only one of us not drinking) occasionally went into schoolmarm mode in a vain attempt to restore decorum. She seems to quite like that role these days.
Also meanwhile, Middlesex bowled really well, we felt. At no point did Australia really get away and we kept revising our estimates of the potential Aussie score downwards. Nathan Sowter took an absolutely stunning catch to secure the first wicket and perhaps settle the nerves of some of the younger players such as Barber, off whose bowling that catch was taken.
The Middlesex batting looked a little weak on paper for this standard of opposition and so it proved on grass. It’s a shame that one or two of the more senior batsmen didn’t dig in a little more, which might have given the less-experienced players a bit less to do. Still, young Holden batted beautifully and the Middlesex players for sure did not embarrass themselves. They gave the Aussies a good workout and the crowd a good match to watch.
The weather smiled on us – the sun was out much of the time but not too hot – it was warm throughout the day, even when the sun went in.
We sat and chatted in the members’ lounge for a few minutes after stumps, to let the crowds subside then walked together to St John’s Wood before going our separate ways; the youngsters further north-west, while we went two stops south to Bond Street and on to “The Wig”, to see Django Bates Belovèd and guests play jazz.
An interesting mix of bluesy, Charlie Parker type jazz and more modern, experimental (almost free) jazz – the latter type pleasing us (especially Janie) less.
Below is a vid of the trio performing without guests.
One of the guests was an incredible saxophonist, Marius Neset. Below is a vid of him performing, but not with Django:
I liked the female vocalist, Claire Huguenin, more than Janie did – I thought her vocals added subtle texture to the music, whereas Janie felt that her voice got lost in the instrumentation. Below is a vid of her performing with her own crew:
Django Bates traditionally wears hats and has adopted the beanie in recent years. His beanie on the night had a sort-of blood and vomit colouring that might have been in honour of the MCC and our earlier visit to Lord’s…
…but on the other hand the colour match was almost certainly a coincidence.
One thing I do realise about no longer being so prone to the description “young man” is that days that start early and end as late as this are no longer in my comfort zone – nor Janie’s. We were ever so happy at the end of a successful and enjoyable day, but also ever so knackered…
…and both of us feel some sense of trepidation about taking our aching backs onto the tennis court…we’re leaving in five minute’s time as I write.
Postscript 10 June
Well, Janie managed to get her body moving again marginally better than I did. But as we came off the tennis court after a long session trying to get moving again, we saw Gerry – an elderly Irish dog-walker, with whom we quite often converse.
Good morning to you, young man, good morning young lady,
said Gerry. So there is a third place where we might still, just occasionally, be addressed in that manner – Boston Manor.
Still, that Friday I had an abstemious day at Lord’s, with a view to having dinner with Daisy and then going to the concert. Daisy indeed came over to my place for a Four Seasons dinner, but then decided that the whole idea of going to a late night concert and then rising for a crack of dawn picnic preparation was too much, so she returned to Noddyland and let me go to this concert on my own.
Probably just as well – she’d have absolutely hated it.
The rubric had inferred a folk/jazz interpretation of Schubert’s songs…which in a sense it was, but it felt a bit gimmicky, at times verging on naff. The tuba/trombone giving the music an Oom-pah-pah band sound…
…if I mention the song where the leader, Bryan Benner, got us to yodel along with him…
…you’re probably getting the gist.
There was a small claque of Erlkings fans sitting behind, but the front row mafia, comprising Wigmore Hall regulars, seemed a little stunned by the style.
The idea is laudable and I even enjoyed some of the tracks. The song which Bryan Benner sang unplugged on the guitar, for example, had a lovely sound to it transposed from piano to guitar. His translations of lyrics generally worked well and he has an outstanding baritone voice. The voice was somewhat wasted with most of the louder arrangements.
Below is one of the songs they performed on the night, with a relatively minimal arrangement:
Below is their signature song, the arrangement of which I thought overpowered Bryan Benner’s powerful voice:
…and here is one from their latest album/project:
At the end of the gig Bryan said an emotional goodbye to Gabriel, the brass instrumentalist, who is leaving the band and for whom the Wigmore Hall was a final gig.
It all felt a bit “ego project” to me, but perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood.
