An unconventional string quartet, four cellos deep, going from Purcell to jazz without breaking a sweat!
Upstairs at Ronnie’s is lit with warm sodium light and rows of chairs face the same direction, close enough to see every bow stroke and finger placement.
The quartet’s premise is a small act of mischief. The cello is quadrupled for an unconventional string quartet. Across the evening the cellos of Ben Rogerson, Tim Lowe, Chris Allan and Ian Burdge found their way into various registers, at times they turned plucked and percussive. Purcell’s Fantasias, written originally for a consort of viols, four hundred years on, the notes don’t seem to mind at all that they’ve swapped one bowed string family for another.
The real pleasure of the night was that so much of it arrived first-hand. With several of the composers in the room, Guy Barker and Simon Baggs among them, the quartet used the space between pieces not for unpicking the pieces. Baggs owned up cheerfully to a Soliloquy written on the back of a run of sleepless nights, and Barker talked through the two very different American trains that thread through Wood on the Tracks, the evening’s title piece and clearly its emotional centre. It’s a title with a wink at Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, letting the four cellos trade off two distinct rail journeys.
The rest of the programme was just as generous in range. Wilhelm Fitzenhagen’s Concert-Waltzer opened things with a swoon of old-world romanticism, before York Bowen’s Suite, Op. 92, rediscovered and relished, showed off a very different, more astringent side of the quartet. Roderick Elms, another composer in the room for the occasion, introduced his high-energy Divertimento with visible pride, and Edward Harris-Brown’s Not Now, Cato! brought the evening’s biggest grins, a playful, jazzy thing that had the whole room smiling well before its final note. Rowland Sutherland’s HOPE sat among all this as the evening’s quieter, more contemplative turn, evidence that the quartet’s range wasn’t only about volume or virtuosity.
By the encore, two further pieces squeezed in past what felt like a natural ending point, nobody in the room seemed especially keen to let the evening stop. Cellophonics have built a chamber group serious enough to commission new work from composers who’ll happily explain their own writing process on the night, and loose enough that a room in Soho, above a jazz club, felt like exactly the right place for it.
Cellophonics: Wood on the Tracks was a one-off performance at Upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s, London on Monday 20th July. Follow them on tour here.