Concert review: Pink Martini - Usher Hall, Edinburgh

IMAGINE a band from Portland, Oregon, whose founding raison d’être was playing fundraisers for liberal causes like civil rights, affordable housing, libraries and the environment.

Now imagine the polar opposite of any drearily right-on, plaid-shirted preconceptions this might have conjured – and add impeccable progressive credentials to the many reasons to love the fabulously sophisticated, musically thrilling Pink Martini. Their Symphonique tour teams them with local orchestras across Europe. Complementing the visitors’ 11-piece line-up, the home team here were the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, justly praised by Pink Martini’s pianist and bandleader Thomas Lauderdale as “heroic”, having mastered an array of lush, complex arrangements in an afternoon despite working off PDF printouts, after the original scores were lost in transit.

Pink Martini’s music takes in aspects of lounge, vintage Latin and golden-age Hollywood, but as this rapturously received performance made sumptuously clear, they’re so much more than some postmodern pastiche outfit. Their original songs splice strands of Schubert with Afro-Cuban rhythms and disco hooklines (the brilliantly ballsy And Then You’re Gone), or limpid Carpenters-esque balladry with a dash of Tchaikovsky (Splendor in the Grass), alternated with reinvented Doris Day hits (a wonderfully spooky Que Sera, Sera) and instrumental Cuban classics (a marvellously extravagant version of Ernesto Lecuona’s Malagueña). With regular vocalist China Forbes on extended sick-leave, Storm Large was a resplendent stand-in, delectably matched by her colleagues’ genre-spanning virtuosity.

Rating: *****