Gig review: Mr McFall's Chamber with Michael Marra

Published on Sunday 30 May 2010 20:14

MR McFALL'S CHAMBER WITH MICHAEL MARRA**** QUEEN'S HALL, EDINBURGH

MR McFALL'S Chamber are the jewel in the Scottish musical crown, continually pushing the envelope of chamber group repertoire and style. Intrepid in their musical taste, here they launched straight into a yearning piece created for Finland's Maria Kalaniemi, later taking us to Argentina courtesy of Piazzolla and Cuba with Alvarez's wildly rhythmic Pregoneros.

This, though, was a night in which their thrilling chamber work was geared to amplifying the songs of Michael Marra, a man who rivals Tom Waits in capturing quirkiness. Marra's genius is to distill wit and wisdom out of musing on improbable encounters steeped in "what ifs".

There's The Lonesome Ballad of Francis Clark for an uncle buried in the Yukon, and a back-handed football tribute based on the incongruous visit of film star Grace Kelly to Dundee United, all interspersed with show-stopping settings of Burns's Slave Lament and one for a Lewis Grassic Gibbon story called Monkey Hair that brought out the goose bumps.

Sitting at the grand piano, Marra delivers everything with an irresistibly gravelly voice, linking songs with lateral stories filled with pithy recollections that become punchlines.

While neither he nor McFall does sentimental, they draw you deftly into a world where desire mingles with the absurd, which is all underscored by cellist Su-a Lee adding shivers of bowed saw, or accordionist Phil Alexander adding sparkles on glockenspiel or thrum from harmonium.

The tour de force, an imagined visit of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo to Dundee's Tay Bridge Bar, was spellbinding.