Gig review: Mr McFall's Chamber, Glasgow

Published on Friday 18 March 2011 20:32

Mr McFall's Chamber St Bride's Church, Glasgow ***

Mr McFall's Chamber played to a small audience in Baltic temperatures at this show. It seemed as uncomfortable for them as it was for us, given the apology issued by Mr Robert McFall that he and his colleagues would have to keep on their scarves, jumpers and fingerless gloves to avoid seizing up.

At least there was comfort knowing the programme was only going to last little over an hour, and that it contained elements of musical warmth in the form of Gavin Bryars' Eight Irish Madrigals. The soft-spun musical language of these settings of Petrarch wafted around the ringing acoustics of St Bride's like a fan heater on low.

They were sung by soprano Susan Hamilton and tenor Nicholas Mulroy, who captured their spirit – mild ecstasy laced with lugubrious, bitter undertones – with pleasing self-restraint and cool. Bryars gives the best lines to the tenor, which Mulroy floated deliciously over the inoffensive ground cover of lower strings – two violas, cello and double bass.

A sequence of new works – four Edward Thomas poems, each set by a different composer and called collectively "If I should ever", using essentially the same ensemble – had a stimulating effect on the evening. Its range of styles – Dylan Curran's wistfulness, Martin Suckling's ethereal inventiveness, Eric Allen's easeful pop idiom, and Joel Rust's delicate luminescence –worked against the odds as a sequential entity. But no amount of fine music can make up for the chill of a cold church.