JENNIE MACFIE toasts a marriage made in heaven

MICHAEL MARRA, gravel-voiced singer/songwriter from Dundee, is a crowning jewel in the Scottish cultural landscape. Though lesser known than his contemporary and former bandmate Dougie Maclean, on the strength of this evening's show I'd bet that it will be Marra who, like Ellington and Gershwin before him, makes the transition to the enduring heights of the classical canon.

Classical musicians playing popular music is not a new concept, but the process usually shows up the inherent predictability that underpins the popularity. In this case, however, the artistry and precision of Mr McFall's Chamber provided the perfect setting for Marra's music, framing and enhancing its quirky brilliance, subtle tunings and emotional depths.

The core members of McFall's also appear with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and other respected classical outfits, but they also consistently enjoy ranging widely and iconoclastically across the musical spectrum from tango to jazz and rock and every nook and cranny in between. The inspired addition of guest Phil Alexander (Salsa Celtica, Moishe's Bagel) on accordion, harmonium, xylophone and delicate, restrained backing vocals was a match made in heaven.

If there was a theme to the evening it was, as Robert McFall announced in his introduction to a tune by another wideranging musical maverick, the Finnish composer Timo Alakotila, loosely grouped around the idea of 'islands'. Loosely was the word, as Marra came on to reprise his lovely ode to his late Great Uncle Francis who died, estranged from his family, in the Yukon.

This was an opportunity to hear Su-a Lee bring out her second instrument, the musical saw, and demonstrate both her virtuosity and the unearthly beauty of the saw. Whoever it was who, probably in the Appalachians in the early 18th century, first discovered that this humble carpentry tool could sing such lovely tones should be canonised.

Some of Marra's songs were inspired by the works of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, such as 'Happed in Mist' which, here, with the strings cascading down behind the words while the saw soared high above, could hold its own with anything by Vaughan Williams. Every so often the self-effacing Marra effaced himself, sidling away on soft soled shoes to leave the stage to McFall's.

Two tunes by Argentinian composer Astor Piazzola, with more than a nod to J S Bach, 'Fugue 9' and 'Chorale', were worth the price of admission alone, from the first notes of the harmonium introduction to the delicate duetting of cello and bass. The price of admission would also have been amply repaid by Marra's version of Burns' 'Slave's Lament', often performed with poignancy, never with such horror and pathos in every note.

An evening of outstandingly beautiful music finished with the whimsically yearning 'Frida Kahlo's visit to the Taybridge Bar', followed, after some rapturous stamping and whistling by the usually reticent OneTouch audience, with the tune Marra wrote for a young, tour-weary, Dougie Maclean, ‘Niel Gow's Apprentice', as an encore.

© Jennie Macfie, 2010

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Michael Marra 

Mr McFall’s Chamber  

Jennie Macfie