GRIT Orchestra at the EIF – 'A powerfully life-affirming amalgam of classical, folk and jazz musicians'

GRIT Orchestra at the Edinburgh International Fringe | Mihaela Bodlovic

GRIT Orchestra

Playhouse, Edinburgh

★★★★★

The GRIT Orchestra grabs you by the scruff of the neck, leaving you to unscramble a sonic jigsaw that fuses Scots traditional song with seething strings, rasping brass and booming club beats. It can also be profoundly moving, however, both in terms of regret that the originator of this pigeon-hole-defying music, the late Martyn Bennett, should have been silenced so young, but also, conversely, that this powerfully life-affirming amalgam of classical, folk and jazz musicians celebrates his legacy.

Arranged by conductor Greg Lawson as a seemingly impossible live recreation of Bennett’s final, powerfully individualistic album, GRIT, a studio concoction of archive recordings, samples and beats, under Lawson’s stewardship the project has taken on a vigorously Protean life of its own. Thus singer Fiona Hunter opened with Move, channelling Traveller singer Sheila Stewart while the orchestra seethed around her. A song about displacement, it seemed all too timely.

The orchestra continued to exert its visceral effect in the surging strings and lumbering percussion behind the droll telephone non-conversations of Aye, or Karen Matheson articulating the vernacular ditty of Alehouse between orchestral eruptions; there was the exhilarating, bagpipe driven juggernaut of Chanter, while Four Notes led the titular phrase into an utterly hypnotic Middle-Eastern sounding riff.

They encored with Paisley Spin, featuring the benediction of Gerry Rafferty's Each and Everyone - sung here by Sorren MacLean, but originally performed with the orchestra by Rab Noakes, sadly now another much missed creative spirit and to whom the piece was dedicated.