You sometimes wonder what orchestra members think when they’re accompanying big pop stars. Do these highly trained musicians, who’ve been studying their craft for decades, look on in faint contempt as someone clearly less skilled than them is in the limelight?
This is clearly not the case when members of the Britten Sinfonia watch tonight’s two star guests: polymath singer/pianist Jacob Collier and mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile. They look on in delighted awe as the two improvise together, egging each other on as they duel on various instruments. During a mashup of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, Collier and Thile lurch delightedly between rapturous free improvisation, ragtime piano and pitch-perfect country and western harmonies; they even manage to weave in an impromptu pastiche of a Bach fugue.
It sums up the anything-goes vibe of this slightly unfocused but hugely enjoyable show, assembled by the always adventurous Britten Sinfonia alongside guest conductor (and mother of Jacob) Suzie Collier. For many years, Suzie, who seems to have the same puppyish enthusiasm as her son, taught at London’s Royal Academy of Music, where she trained several of tonight’s soloists, including lead violinist Thomas Gould (who stars on a wonderfully creaky version of a Piazzolla tango) and young cellists Danushka Edirisinghe and Finn Anderson-Hendra, who feature on a gorgeous minimalist piece by the Italian composer Giovanni Sollima.
It is an impressively varied programme, but one gets the impression that the audience are less interested in the versions of Jacob Collier’s old LP tracks or Thile’s songs with his bluegrass band the Punch Brothers, beautifully orchestrated though they all are. We’re more interested in the pair of them as circus performers. Thile takes the lead on a Samuel Barber violin concerto, replacing the complex violin lead line with his mandolin. He plays one of his solo mandolin versions of a Bach sonata, and duets with Collier, who sings one of the violin lead lines from Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins. Collier replicates Fauré’s Pie Jesu in a perfect choirboy falsetto, and – with a few simple hand gestures – gets the audience to sing along in three-part harmony to Celtic folk songs or Queen or the Police numbers. Watching Thile and Collier might be the sonic equivalent of watching a dog tap-dance on its hind legs but, frankly, when the tap-dancing is this good, who is complaining?
