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December 2007
gig reviews

Guy Barker Jazz Orchestra
Damon Brown/Yutaka Shiina Quartet
Max Grunhard Sextet
The TransAtlantic Collective
Christine Tobin
Eclectica

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December gig reviews by Chris Parker

Eclectica

Saturday 15 December – Holywell Music Room, Oxford

A quartet comprising a founder member of the Lindsay String Quartet, cellist Bernard Gregor-Smith; a violinist, Lizzie Ball, who has performed with everyone from the Covent Garden Soloists and the Philharmonia to Simply Red and Meatloaf; Argentinean guitarist Luis D'Agostino and long-standing guitar-duo partner Pete Oxley, is appropriately named Eclectica! (as in the label Impulse!, or the musicalsOliver! or Oklahoma! the exclamation mark is part of the name).

This was billed as a Christmas concert, and started, suitably enough, with a graceful version of the Torm¬/Wells classic 'Christmas Song', swiftly followed by a simple but affecting arrangement of 'Silent Night', but subsequently the quartet applied their characteristic mix of filigree delicacy and tastefully restrained power to a broad range of material, from Brazilian and Argentinean music and original blues and ballads by Oxley to songs by contemporary singer/songwriters.

Thus a yearningly lovely visit to Consuelo Velőzquez's evergreen 'B¬same Mucho' was juxtaposed with a touching arrangement, respectful but not over-reverent, of Joni Mitchell's self-critical, melancholy study of loss and regret, 'River', flawlessly sung by the multi-talented Ball; or the 'classical' elements of the quartet performed a moving version of Zoltőn Kodőly's plangent Duo for Violin and Cello, balanced by the guitar duo playing a piece by Brazilian maestro Egberto Gismonti.

Culminating with an exhilarating rush through Chick Corea's breathless 'Spain' (which aptly and uncontrivedly tied together the majority of the quartet's musical enthusiasms in a single piece), this was an unequivocally enjoyable, unaffectedly wide-ranging concert performed by four musicians whose undoubted virtuosity was consistently deployed solely in the service of the music.

 

 

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