Music
Mr McFall’s Chamber
City Halls Recital Room, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
Four stars
FOR the final programme of its At Home in a Foreign Land season of concerts, Robert McFall’s eclectic chamber ensemble was often on familiar musical territory, but the thematic landscape, exploring the links between composers who made their reputations far from home, was as carefully defined as in all the concerts that have preceded it. The softly-spoken violinist was characteristically fascinating as he introduced works covering three centuries, by the mature Mozart, precocious teenager Felix Mendelssohn and tango-master Astor Piazzolla, highlighting the latter’s shared – and Boulanger-nurtured – affinity with Bach.
All three were also, of course, masters of melody, and the Piano Quartet in G Minor contains some of Mozart’s best known chamber music tunes. With McFall himself in the leader’s chair, unusually, and pianist Graeme McNaught a little over-loud at the start, it took a while to find a good balance, but concluded as a vibrant celebration of a work that came towards the end of a happy purple patch of the composer’s life.
McFall moved to viola, alongside Brian Schiele, for the unusually-scored sextet by the fifteen-year-old Mendelssohn, regular Rick Standley coming in on bass behind cellist Su-a Lee and Cyril Garac the first violin. The combination made for a very rich ensemble sound in the space, with some radical switches of tempo and rhythm as the work develops. Although not in form, in content it is almost a piano concerto in miniature, and hugely demanding of the pianist. With a much better balance between keyboard and strings, McNaught was on magnificent form in what is a very challenging work.
The same instrumentation, with McFall back on second fiddle, played his arrangements of Piazzolla after the interval - and this is repertoire for which his group have few competitors. As well as Bach, there are other baroque echoes in Autumn from the composer’s take on the seasons, but it is also not too fanciful to hear an affinity with King Crimson – whose repertoire McFall’s has also visited – in Piazzzolla’s way with a Fugue.
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