Swingle Singers @ Cadogan Hall

Excited by: The prospect of sister's 'Christmas Rehearsal' dinner on sunday 
Listening to: Cilla Black...
Cups of coffee achieved: 2 (plus one eggnog latté...mistake, bleurgh)

So, this be my new blog. Please feel free to make yourself at home and drop me comments, otherwise these things can become incredibly dull. You can also tweet (I still don't feel totally right saying that...) me @geocham if you want to condense your thoughts to a few precise words. And on that note...

The Swingle Singers are one of those established musical institutions that the music world seems to have forgotten. And why do I start this first blog on a rather Victor Meldrew-esque statement? Because last week I witnessed what has to be the best concert of my a cappella life... and yet nothing has appeared in the press. In fact, UK a cappella gets hardly any press coverage whatsoever. I suppose part of the problem lies in its placing in the media - where do you list a cappella concerts? They sit awkwardly on the fence between pop, classical and jazz, but surely that is so often their charm.

Personally a couple of numbers really did it for me - Sara Brimer's haunting solo in Nick Drake's 'Riverman' effortlessly ebbed and flowed its way around a simple but haunting waltz-like accompaniment. From my Gargoyle arrangements I'm always worried of over-arranging... but this proved quite the opposite. I don't know the arranger, but I know they're probably prime Swingle stock. In comparison I'm a bit dubious about the Swingles' and Richard Niles' new 'Romeo ♥ Juliet' project which is a reworking of Bernstein's 'West Side Story'. Do we need a reworking of West Side quite yet? Hm, I do wonder. I'm still actually quite enjoying the original. The Swingles performed the two complicated arrangements with vigour, but 'complicated' is where I think a problem is brewing. I'm all up for experiment, but I couldn't help listening thinking 'that's Bernstein', then hearing a flurry of crunchy extended chords thinking 'that certainly isn't Bernstein'. It may prove to be a blessing, who knows. At the moment it sounds jilted, and often complex for the sake of adding extra 9ths or 13ths to perfectly acceptable Bernsteinian chords.

I'm excited to see what the Swingles pull out of the bag for the next few instalments of  'Romeo ♥ Juliet'. What cannot be argued is that no other a cappella group can claim to have such vivacious variety as the Swingles, or so I believe, anyhow. From traditional folksong arrangements to Corea with some well programmed Beatles pit stops along the way, the group provided the audience with a good two hours of toe-tapping tunes. This is there the Swingles really excel - they give the audience exactly what they want: highs of Glee-esque a cappella in the tour de force numbers such as Alexander L'Estrange's arrangement of Quincy Jones' 'Soul Bossa Nova' and 'A Fifth of Beethoven', followed by a few blissfully serene (with, of course, wonderful mood lighting to accompany) homophonic ballads to balance it all out.

The Swingles show how a cappella should be done, and to add to it all they are lovely people as everyone found out post-gig... We should be proud of our Swingles - I may have not seen any reviews, but for a performance like I saw, i'd be happy to give them five gleaming stars any day.