  Go to LAN277 - Someone To Watch Over Me
|
BBC Music Magazine (Performance **** Sound *****), September 2006
'These days it’s hard to imagine crossover music minus the glitzy packaging that bedecks most glossy magazines. This CD of imaginative quartet arrangements of popular numbers by Gershwin, Kern and Berlin et al is no exception. A bevy – if that’s the right word – of beauties adorn the disc’s cover, cynics no doubt easily misled into thinking of this as yet another obvious marketing ploy. Yet the talented Pavão Quartet never resort to superficial gimmicks, offering playing that is extremely assured with a meticulous sense of ensemble captured in a warmly ambient recording…the programme is sufficiently varied in mood and tempo to make for very agreeable background listening. Some of the arrangements are particularly ingenious, not only presenting an infinite range of textures and effects, but in the case of ‘A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square’ appropriately allowing bits of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending to enter into the musical argument. More intriguingly, I’d love to know why the first few bars of Wagner’s Meistersinger Overture precede an affectionate version of Berlin’s ‘Cheek to Cheek’.
'
Erik Levi
|
