Mr McFall'sChamber ~ REVIEWS

The Times – April 11^th ‘07

***

Robert Dawson Scott

Dave Heath’s ticklish relationship with the classical music establishment, which never knows quite what to do with him, may not be improved by the opening moments of this odd hybrid chamber opera. Heath himself appears as Helmut Krantz, a rather good caricature of the all too familiar pompous, egomaniacal conductor. He is giving a master class, starting with the gag that the first thing a conductor needs is not talent or music but a very powerful agent.

It’s a funny prelude that almost upstages and certainly sets the wrong tone for the rest of the piece, which turns out to be a melancholy love-triangle about a musician heading for the buffers. He is getting a bit older, a bit cynical, a bit drunk, and having a bit on the side.

The “everyday occurrence” is not that orchestral musicians get treated like cattle or that orchestral managements feather their own nests at the players’ expense. It’s that the old guy gets the keen young recruit in the family way and that his loyal wife throws him out when she finds out.

This story line is nicely written and sung, in a musical language that Britten or even Delius would recognise. The final trio (Angela Tunstall as the wife, Andrea Baker as the young oboist and Gwion Thomas as the man on the slide) is genuinely affecting.

Heath would like the satire – there’s another scene where an orchestral manager comes on to fire the chorus to pay for his new PA – to connect with the melancholy and to show that the way the rank and file are treated propels them to unhappy ends. But at the moment the gears don’t mesh.

Mr McFall’s Chamber, which supplies the 12-piece band, are in fine form. At the end-of-tour party, the leader Steve Morris kicks off a toe-tapping jam session which, in a way, sums up the musicians’ lot best of all. Driven to extremes by the business, when they do finally get the chance to relax, the only way they can think of doing so is by playing music.

The Herald – April 9^th ’07

Greeting each other as if they were long-lost friends suddenly and unexpectedly reunited, members of Mr McFall's Chamber exchange jokes, pleasantries and glances of surprised delight as they filter on to the stage for this evening's performance.

Knowing that they had, in fact, performed the very previous night together made their apparent reunion all the more idiosyn cratic, and thus, entirely in keeping with the company's reputation, and, indeed, their latest project.

The tone is reassuringly casual; the stage is one part filled with musicians and music stands, while the rest of the space is dedicated to two crummy sofas, a bed, an upright piano and a television on a cheap plastic trolley.

Dave Heath's one-act opera, An Everyday Occurrence, is a story set in the pit of the orchestra, and revolves around the ill-fated life of John, the middle-aged musician with alcohol problems who impregnates a fellow colleague, much to the chagrin of his wife, and mourns his decision to turn down a prestigious position with the New York Philharmonic.

Woven into the main narrative is a series of asides and little sketches that bring to life some rather cliched examples of stereotypical music business characters: the diva soprano, wonderfully played by Angela Tunstall, and the gruff, ego-centric conductor who humiliates and irritates the orchestra.

Moments of genuinely interesting musical material, and some excellent performances are, though, let down by an unimaginative libretto that aims, perhaps a little too earnestly, to be self-conscious and satirical, but in truth feels more like an exercise in suburban verismo.

- by Amy Parker

The Scotsman, April 7^th ’07:

MR McFALL'S CHAMBER ****
QUEEN'S HALL, EDINBURGH

THE human dramas that play out behind the scenes once the music stops is a rich seam which David Heath mines to great effect in his chamber opera about orchestral musicians - An Everyday Occurrence.

John, a jaded oboist with a career full of regrets, goes on tour with the young star-struck Suzanne, hits the bottle, and before you can say "ritornello" she's pregnant and John's marriage is history. It is a common and pathetically tragic occurrence which Heath explores with acerbic accuracy amid a colourful whirl of egotistical conductors, scatty divas and orchestral managers who would rather have more admin than a chorus.

Heath is something of a musical maverick with a style that is a blend of funky Bernstein, jazz, rap and even Philip Glass in several of the repetitious passages. By and large, this worked well alongside a surprisingly conventional and occasionally soppy libretto. "I still play your Strauss around the house" is a cringing line of flattery, yet Andrea Baker, the highly impressive American mezzo-soprano singing Suzanne, carried it off superbly.

Angela Tunstall, as the spurned wife, did indignation beautifully and her French diva made to sing with a Yorkshire accent - "Oi, who do you think you are looking at?" - was surreally real. Gwion Thomas, as the hapless John, also sang poignantly, particularly in the operatic soliloquies, the form Heath uses most frequently to tell his story.

For the musicians in Mr McFall's Chamber, this was an opportunity to show off their not inconsiderable acting, drinking and dancing talents. But these were not quite up to their first-rate musical contributions, and this, along with the constant shifting of point of view and tone, tended to break up the narrative line, making it difficult for the plot to develop in a substantial and meaningful way.

This was definitely a work for musicians/artistes and it was intriguing to see such an impressive line-up from the arts world sitting in the audience, chortling away at characters and situations that clearly struck a familiar chord. Heath's wacky sense of theatricality is always entertaining, and giving himself a stand-up routine to open the show was an inspired stroke.

Cutting a Peter Ustinov-type figure, Heath, as Helmut Krauss, proceeded to give a hilarious masterclass in conducting which, again, possessed more than a grain of verisimilitude.

This article: http://living.scotsman.com/music.cfm?id=534252007

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Michael Marra should be put on some sort of stipend by the City of Dundee's PR department. He reveals it as being populated and enlivened by people, habits and events every bit as rich as those of cities that fancy themselves as more characterful.
This concert featured Marra in his element. The most chronic of stage-fright sufferers has begun to actually enjoy performing, and it was wonderful to see him revelling in anecdotes and cheeky wit. His confident, unaccompanied rendering of Muggie Sha' brought a Hogarthian tale graphically to life.
Marra's songs are always written for a reason, and the reasons are as entertaining – or moving – as the words and music. Other standouts here, alongside a message of support to Shirley McKie and a withering dissertation on Sabbath observance, were two songs enhanced by a string quartet from Mr McFall's Chamber. Marra has a history of working with strings, and the warm, precise colouring the McFalls brought to his tribute to Shetland guitarist Peerie Willie Johnson and his empathic homage to Grassic Gibbon's Chris Guthrie, Monkey Hair, suggested they should get together more often. Indeed, there's potential, surely, for a full-scale Marra-McFalls collaboration.

Review of Mr McFalls Chamber Orchestra Performance at All Saints Church, 9th July 2006 – from the Vamos Festival web-site:

Mr McFall’s Chamber, an ensemble whose accomplished members play with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, gave a rich, enjoyable concert
at All Saints Church in Newcastle on a cool Sunday afternoon. The program had a Spanish/Latin American focus (to be expected, as it was part of a Hispanic music festival), but with a heavy Parisian accent; the musical choices, ranging from pleasurable to powerful, all tended to emphasize sensual sound, or sounds about sensuality. Several of the composers weren’t familiar to me – I noted the Cuban Fabio Landa, whose Pequeña Suite Cubana started the concert with a ravishing, Ravelesque quality, and two lively Cuban piano dances by Ignacio Cervantes. There was some Piazzolla, of course – extremely well played and enjoyable; but more noticeable were the local composers, the songs, and the saw.

Locals included Sergio Camacho’s Four Names for the One Moon, whose fascinating, fragmentary beginning showed a lot of promise; and Agustín Fernández’ Botanic Spider, which was definitely the ‘powerhouse’ work of the afternoon. I’m not just saying this because he’s a colleague of mine – no, honestly – but it was a truly powerful piece with a massive impact: the intellectual intricacies of the first movement set up a seriousness that was fulfilled by a final movement whose power recalled for me such works as Wolpe’s Passacaglia. Leavening all that intensity were four cabaret songs, wonderfully performed by Taylor Wilson; she had chosen dramatic longer songs by Jobim, Weill and Brel, and delivered them with a dark, throaty quality that thoroughly sold the tragic, erotic ‘wrist-slashers.’ There was also an unexpected cameo for musical saw – I was, perhaps pardonably, distracted by trying to figure out exactly how Su-a Lee (normally the group’s cellist) was producing those sounds. The result was campy, but quite wonderful, especially as the first violinist had such a good ear for playing along with the saw.

My strongest final impression was of the easy confidence of these artists; their flexible approaches to programming, and assured skills at making a variety of musics sound very good indeed, were carried off without effort or fanfare. There should be more chamber groups in the world that are both this dazzling and this intimate; if there were, we’d all probably enjoy chamber music the way it was enjoyed a century ago.

Paul Attinello

Mr McFall's Chamber
Fri 22 Apr 2005
SUE WILSON

MR MCFALL’S CHAMBER *****
BONGO CLUB, EDINBURGH

FOLLOWING the success of their first English tour, the second of this week’s two Scottish gigs by anarcho-classical mavericks Mr McFall’s Chamber marked a triumphant return to their birthplace. The homecoming, though, was spiritual rather than precisely geographic: this was actually McFall’s debut in the Bongo Club’s current premises, but they first emerged - nearly ten years ago now - out of the original venue’s pioneering None of the Above cross-genre music showcases, which, it’s rumoured, are set to be revived at Holyrood Road.

Replicating the programme they performed down south, the eight-piece line-up of string quartet, bass, piano, percussion and drums - with cellist Su-a Lee also doubling memorably on saw - combined a mini greatest-hits selection with a newly commissioned piece by the award-winning Scottish composer Kenneth Dempster. The former, including music by the tango maestro Astor Piazzolla, Frank Zappa, King Crimson, Joe Zawinul of Weather Report and the eccentric US cartoon composer Raymond Scott, delighted as ever with its kaleidoscopic mood/mode swings and bravura technique.

Dempster’s Six Feet of Blood, partly inspired by the Norman MacCaig poem So Many Make One, was prefaced by a wisely worded introduction from the group’s co-founder, Robert McFall, aimed at assuaging any audience anxieties about encountering "new" music. It was easy to fall under the music’s spell, as it wove its way adroitly between melody and discord, tumult and serenity, tension and resolution, into a whole that was as adventurous as it was approachable.

First Night reviews

March 22, 2005
Mr McFall's Chamber
Geoff Brown at Bush Hall, W12

ABOUT ten years ago some string members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra decided to take a walk on the wild side. Out went Mozart; in came rock classics, Dadaist poetry and platform demeanour never encountered at Usher Hall. The assault-course aspect of Robert McFall’s group, currently configured with strings, piano, drums, percussion and electrics, may now be reduced, but their energy is untamed.

On Friday night, as Piazzolla tangos bled into madcap Frank Zappa, monumental King Crimson, Raymond Scott’s dotty delights and a new piece by Kenneth Dempster, every other ensemble’s crisscross concert seemed by comparison pain and sweat. Music’s pigeonholes were effortlessly destroyed, inhibitions freed and pleasure let rampant. The venue no doubt helped: the pleasantly raffish Bush Hall, a former Edwardian ballroom, obviously hasn’t seen a bow-tie in years.

The lack of a stage was the building’s only drawback. When Su-a Lee ran her musical saw through the hypnotic simplicities of a Raymond Scott jingle for Portofino sherry, the spectacle deserved something more than a glimpse between people’s shoulders.

Still, the sound and fury were usually fine: hot, driving and highly expressive, at least until the amplification near the end traded the music’s intricacies for an overemphatic bass beat. Zappa’s hiccupping rhythms in Echidna’s Arf deserved crystal clarity in the sound balance; they didn’t get it.

But there was so much else to be happy about. Phil Alexander’s crisp, pounding piano helped the five Piazzolla selections fly, though he delivered equally well when the music turned tender and elegiac, as in Adiós Nonino, the memorial to Piazzolla’s father. Electricity, sex appeal, an open heart: these tangos held all the aces. Even so, it was good when the mood changed for the plaintive Balkan tunes skilfully dished up by Alexander and Greg Lawson on violin and accordion, or Su-a Lee’s smoochy cello in A Remark You Made by Joe Zawinul of Weather Report.

With Dempster’s Six Feet of Blood the selection came closest to classical contemporary norms. Yet here, too, eclectic display ruled, with Stravinskian syncopations, Piazzolla’s hot smoke, and lyrical harmonies jostling inside a 12-minute structure that began to make more sense once the work’s inspiration, “a Norman MacCaig poem about life’s stages”, had been properly digested.

But whatever the mood or effect, the players were always splendid. I’d enter Mr McFall’s Chamber any day.

Scotsman Fri 14 May 2004:

Mr McFall’s Chamber

KENNY MATHIESON

Mr McFall’s Chamber

NATIONAL HOTEL, DINGWALL

THIS ever-eclectic chamber group mixed and matched jazz,

klezmer and tango in its usual effective fashion in Dingwall

on Wednesday night, and threw in a bit of Zappa for good

measure. It has added three guests to its line-up for this

Highland tour - a prelude to a concert at the Queen’s Hall in

Edinburgh on 8 June. Music by those guests - saxophonist Phil

Bancroft, pianist Chick Lyall and pianist and accordionist

Phil Alexander - occupied a substantial portion of the show.

Bancroft’s Levin’s Capitulation, inspired by a character from

Anna Karenina, spotlighted several soloists, including

violinist Greg Lawson, cellist Su-a Lee, Lyall’s piano, and

his own tenor. Lyall’s energised, three-part Flashback proved

a strong piece that kept the players on their toes.

Alexander’s arrangements of tangos by Astor Piazzolla and

tunes from eastern Europe studded the programme, which also

featured Su-a Lee’s outing on musical saw on a lush Moon River.

Mr McFall’s Chamber

Mr McFall’s Chamber
Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

NINE players, faces recognisable from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, a composer, artist, video projectionist and sound system - for a sizeable group, Mr McFall’s Chamber put on a relaxed entertainment of hypnotic rhythms, jazzy riffs, sensitive ensemble playing and intriguing special effects.

The result was hard to pin down, bringing together an audience of all ages (many of whom were moved to whoop and cheer) for a programme built around a series of three works by Matilda Brown, who was inspired by study of Coptic tapestries in Egypt.

The same tapestries that inspired Brown got the artist Colin Lawson experimenting with colour, and the resulting paintings, on show in the bar, were deceptively easy on the eye. Striking aquamarine and deep, deep red spars and stripes revealed with the aid of video back projection in the hall images suggestive of faces, flames, supernatural beings - make of it what you would.

At a time when classical musicians are looking for ways to be more accessible, Mr McFall - violinist Robert, who plays second fiddle to Greg Lawson’s first - has hit on a winning formula: music that constantly shifts, from miked-up contemporary chamber style through jazz to electronica.

They began with two Latin-nuanced pieces by Astor Piazzola, highly rhythmic and fun. Tangled By Reason was the first of Brown’s three reflective compositions, all of them built on a hypnotic bass motif and exploring the possibilities of pattern and variation. Details of Lawson’s paintings took on freakish form behind them.

Highlights of the evening included Su-a Lee, taking a break from cello, tackling Raymond Scott’s Portofino on musical saw, and Maxim Martin on clarinet shifting from classics to laid-back jazz in Eddie Daniels’s Metamorphosis.

This was highly polished stuff, an arrangement of Robert Fripp’s Discipline another standout. The video was generally mesmerising. My quibble? The back projection left out the apostrophe in Mr McFall’s. Lynn Truss would have been deeply shocked.

Mary Crockett
Wednesday, 7th April 2004
The Scotsman

Herald 14^th February 03:

Mr McFall entertains us well

Music

Mr McFall's Chamber, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

Michael Tumelty

IT'S partly to do with the nature of the beast, and the ethos of the music they perform, but concerts by Mr McFall's Chamber, the left-field group which is a spin-off from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, are often drawn-out, rather bitty, if hugely enjoyable affairs.

Not so with Robert McFall's latest programme, unveiled on Wednesday in the Queen's Hall and coming to the Royal Concert Hall's Strathclyde Suite tonight. Though it seems to contain no less music, and certainly features no less variety - staggering as always - the event, Crosscurrents, is an infinitely more cogent presentation than some earlier McFall programmes.

Aficionados of this ebullient group will rack their brains for the reasons. I suspect that John McGeoch's continuously-projected video images might be a factor lending a degree of uniformity to the atmosphere of the evening. The music itself is highly organised, with a strong contemporary classical element - a beautifully-played version of Sally Beamish's soulful Gala Water, new works from Cecilia McDowall (a dazzling, Bartokian - Dance Through Dark Streets), Brian Schiele (a pulsing, infectiously rhythmic, untitled piece), and Mathilda Brown's dreamy, impressionistic Awake in Shadows, with a hilarious performance by Graeme McNaught of John Cage's Water Music, where the accompanying projections bring a new dimension to the old aleatoric canard.

These apart, the programme was a musical travelogue through familiar McFall territory, with blisteringly virtuosic playing of Frank Zappa classics, and atmospheric performances of music by Piazzolla and King Crimson, all delivered with characteristic elan and swashbuckling bravado. Good stuff; and, whatever gave the mysterious unity to the programme, it is worth exploring and cultivating.

The Herald 1^st November ‘02

A performance that kept it's promise

Music

Mr McFall's Chamber, St John's Church, Edinburgh

Conrad Wilson

An hour of pared down, slow-moving music can make gruelling demands on an audience, not least if it is performed in the discomfort of a darkened Edinburgh church. As the cliché goes, we have been there, heard that, and the information printed in the programme about Giya Kancheli's music enabling us to "float, cloud-like, in eternity" was hardly promising.

So, the first thing to be said about this Georgian exile's cantata entitled Exil, which received its British premiere on Wednesday under the auspices of Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust, is that it was very beautiful, unhurried (it couldn't possibly have been hurried), trance-like in the sense that Schubert could be trance-like, desolate, and deeply sad. Dislocation was its theme - the traumas and despairs of displaced people - and it was expressed in luminous, vivid music, never sensational, but as sharp as a knife.

Expressed, too, by the clear, pure soprano voice of Susan Hamilton, who brought a sort of chaste melancholy to the music and the words of exiled poets that sounded exactly right. Even the slow, detached notes of a brief descending scale, the way she sang them, spoke with forlorn eloquence, as did the tones of viola, cello, and alto and bass flute, which figured prominently in the accompaniment.

Mr McFall's Chamber, that versatile ensemble, was conducted sympathetically and undistractingly by Peter Nelson. Various others, including Graeme McNaught on synthesiser and a treble (Peter Innes) from St Mary's Music School, contributed to the effect. The composer of this haunting score? Now in his late sixties, he has settled in Belgium.

International Record Review September '01 issue:

Revolucionario/Upstart Jugglers

Reviewing "Like The Milk" on page 82 of the March 2000 issue, I looked forward to further releases from this refreshingly diverse outfit. Now, on their own label, come not one but two follow-ups, both with the Mr McFall's flair for vivid and memorable arrangements fully in evidence.

'¡Revolucionario!' is a tribute to the Latin soul. Piazzolla is well represented, opening with the alternate high jinks and yearning melanchloy of Otoño Porteño. The arrangement of Adiós Nonino, with its melting piano intro, tugs at the heartstrings, while the contrapuntal energy of Mar del Plata and strenuous interplay of the title track confirm that the group has absorbed the spirit of this music into its realizations. The expressive warmth of Coral must captivate patrons of the Bongo Club!

What makes this disc especially attractive is the inclusion of several nueva canción by writers from within the tango tradition. Valentina Montoya-Martinez is as alluring in the smouldering regret of Calla corazón and Cuando silba el viento as in the many-layered nostalgia of the Isabel Parra number. Y somos la gente and Noche de Ronda deal with the refractory nature of communication between individuals in the modern world, before Quedémonos aquí seeks to define time and place in the search for a new beginning. Concealing vast reserves of emotion within its wistful demeanour, the Victor Jara song which closes the album captures the essence of this music as a whole.

'Upstart Jugglers' is stylistically more wide-ranging. Cumnock Fair is one of James MacMillan's most focused pieces, undermining its authentically derived dances with music of Shostakovitch-like emotional dislocation, before a chilling disintegration at the close. Social unrest is more directly evident in Edward McGuire's Nocturnes, the spectre of social conflict imposing itself in forceful ways on the limpid piano solos which preface each section, before the driving close glimpses affirmation.

Try programming these substantial pieces either end of the recital, and enjoy the varied miscellany that then comes in between. Raymond Scott's mummified square dance is all one would expect from this recklessly innovative figure, while subtly varied versions of Matte Kudesai and The Sheltering Sky - electronic strings utilized with commendable restraint - commemorate the twentieth anniversary of King Crimson's influential 'Discipline' album. Dave Brady adds his distinctive vocals to vibrant refits of Blind Alfred Reed's prohibition lament and Trevor Lucas's Ned Kelly tribute, and a deliciously swung version of Lowell George's ballad (sic). Richard Thompson's The great Valerio has the right plangency (how about a cover of 'Calvary Cross'?), and you have to hand it to a group who can include the viol-like austerity of Gesualdo and a Dadaist rendition of Piaf's immortal La vie en rose on the same disc.

Both discs encapsulate music-making that is both emotionally engaging and intellectually stimulating, making these discs worthwhile acquisitions on all counts. Memo tothe Barbican and South Bank Centre: next time the Scottish Chamber Orchestra performs there, why not arrange a post-performance gig from Mr McFall's Chamber so that those of us 'down South' can enjoy the pleasure of their company too?

Graham Simpson

The Herald, 18th June '01: "Upstart Jugglers Mr Mcfall's Chamber, Queens Hall, Edinburgh"

Just occasionally, there's a sanctimonious whiff of condescension from the classical world towards Mr McFall's Chamber - that a group of distinguished classical musicians from the Scottish Chamber orchestra have developed a little "hobby" for themselves, and have worked it up into a "novelty item".

Well, it depends on your point of view. My own, expressed last week in a feature profile of violinist Robert McFall's adventurous group - is that, in their new, multi-genre album, Upstart Jugglers, the ensemble has defined itself, has come of age, and has firmly laid down its criteria.

That view was absolutely confirmed in the launch concert for the new album on Saturday night.I believe the group - in what it does, and in what it represents - is potentially the most important single development on the Scottish musical scene for a long time.

All you had to do was look at the cross-generation, cross-party audience that thronged the Queens Hall, which was decked out for the occasion in cabaret livery. There is not another musical entity in the country tht would bring together an audience mix like this one, which ranged across classical and clubbing generations.

And what did they hear? What did they not hear, more like. By and large, the new album translated superbly into a live stage performance, delivering an unbelievably rich mix of music, from James MacMillan at his most rambunctious to Robert Burns at his most acid, from the heady chromaticism of Gesualdo to the irresistable, gospel-like refrain of Blind Alfred Reed's "How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live?", the swooning hedonism of the arrangement of King Crimson's Matte Kudasai, the eye-watering whimsy of La Vie En Rose, and the sultry soul of Astor Piazzolla's tango, Coral.

Interestingly, given the complexity of the orchestral mix - which happily coupled electric and acoustic instruments - there wasn't a single ineffective number. And, even more interestingly, despite the stylistic brew of music, nothing sidelined anything else. Both MacMillan's brilliant Cumnock Fairand Edward McGuire's wonderfully expressive Nocturnes sat comfortably in this kaleidoscopic display. This superb group, and this excellent show ahould be on tour throughout Scotland. There are hearts and minds out there to conquer. And that's the question for the Chamber. Do they sit where they are in Scotland's music scene, or do they develop?

Michael Tummelty

From The Herald, 13th June '01"

This weekend sees a defining moment in the short history of Robert McFall's idiosyncratic, cross-border group, Mr McFall's Chamber. With its third album, Upstart Jugglers, to be launched in a major concert in Edinburgh's Queen's Hall on Saturday night, the most distinctive of Scottish groups has come of age. Though McFall's outfit is well known in the music business, awareness of them is not as widespread as is deserved. The music business loves categories and pigeonholes. Anyone who doesn't fit neatly into one of these can find themselves in the no man's land of the miscellaneous box. Mr McFall's Chamber is a case in point. How do you label an ensemble that is comprised of a core of classical musicians from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, but which includes in its repertoire music by rock legends King Crimson and Elvis Costello, cheerfully juxtaposed with folk music, modern tangos, and classical music by the godfather of serialism, Anton von Webern, the seventeenth-century madrigal composer and murderer, Carlo Gesualdo, the doyen of American minimalists, John Adams, and modern Scottish classicists James MacMillan and Edward McGuire?

And how do you pigeonhole a group that sits as easily in the post-midnight darkness of Edinburgh's Bongo Club as it does in the austere recital setting of the Queen's Hall, or the stylish elegance of the House for an Art Lover in Bellahouston Park?

A brief historical note, for anyone still unfamiliar with the Chamber - as the group is known. It was conceived in clubland, where violinist Robert McFall's sons played in rock groups. Old dad McFall used to turn up to help the boys lug the amplifiers home.

One of the clubs - the Transporter Rooms in Edinburgh - with a penchant for the exotic, having featured Indian music and free jazz, suggested that McFall père and some his classical cronies might like to do a gig. McFall and a group of like-minded spirits from the SCO took up the challenge, put together a programme of Purcell, Webern, and Arvo Part, lightened it with Weather Report's Birdland, and entered clubland. Thus was born the Chamber some five years ago.

"Immediately, we realised there was a line to be explored," said McFall, who was intrigued that, at that first gig, one evidently stoned character danced right through Webern's string quartet, while the audience sat "absolutely mesmerised" by the hypnotic music of Arvo Part. That early experience led to a residency at Edinburgh's Bongo Club, and, meanwhile, the original quartet format expanded, taking in piano and bass to perform the tangos that were becoming central to their repertoire. Scottish Arts Council funding followed, and the Chamber's reputation burgeoned as an off-the-wall (or bonkers) outfit.

And that, says McFall, is part of the problem. "Partly because we're so offbeat, people can't imagine what on earth we're talking about if we write and tell them what we do. It doesn't make much sense on paper."

They ran into similar problems with their first album, Like the Milk. "One of the difficulties was that the distributors had to ask us where they should display it - world music, rock, classical?" All of which has helped focus McFall's thinking. "We are, essentially, a classical ensemble who do other things."

That thinking is reflected in the superb new album, Upstart Jugglers, which, quite consciously, kicks off with major classical compositions by two of Scotland's leading figures: James MacMillan, represented by his dazzling Cumnock Fair, commissioned by Cumnock Music Club, and premiered by Mr McFall's Chamber in 1999, and Edward McGuire's hauntingly beautiful Nocturnes, commissioned by the Chamber in the same year. Then, after these two works, the fun starts as the group go rampant with cartoon composer Raymond Scott's Square Dance for Eight Egyptian Mummies, a rip-roaring gospel version of Blind Alfred Reed's How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Things and Live, Lowell George's Twenty Million Things, Richard Thompson's The Great Valerio, and Trevor Lucas's The Ballad of Ned Kelly.

In between, there is a dash of Gesualdo (in period instrument style) and King Crimson's The Sheltering Sky. But the pièces de resistance are the group's ravishing instrumental version of King Crimson's Matte Kudasai, where group leader Greg Lawson takes up the electric violin, while cellist Su-a Lee puts down her cello and takes the theme on musical saw, joined on cor anglais by Rosie Staniforth and, in the closing track, a whimsical version of Edith Piaf's deathless ballad, La Vie en Rose, replete with noises off that could be straight from a French café, and a whistling obbligato, provided by what McFall calls "a chorus of rather inexpert siffleurs". Hear it all on Saturday.

* Mr McFall's Chamber, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, Sat 16, 8pm. Upstart Jugglers available in some independent record stores, or through the website: www.mcfalls.co.uk

Michael Tummelty

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Herald 14^th February 03:

Mr McFall entertains us well

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Herald 14th February 03:

Mr McFall entertains us well

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