Rhapsody Quintet holds audience in rapture

By Stephen Pedersen / Arts Reporter - Saturday, February 1, 2003

Rhapsody Quintet has a corner on palm court music. I can't think of another ensemble, certainly not in the East, that has so industriously plumbed the depths or (more accurately, perhaps) the shallows of this frothy, charming repertoire.

I say "shallows" not to belittle it but because of the way lyricism and lilt combine to pour out nostalgic melodies that wear their hearts on their sleeves. Part of the appeal of this repertoire as played Friday night on the Traditional Pops concert by Rhapsody and Symphony Nova Scotia, is the way it evokes its era: let's say 1910 to the Wall Street Crash.

Charles Ancliffe's Nights of Gladness Waltz, Edouard Poldini's Poupee Valsante, even Percy Fletcher's Bal Masque and Ernest Tomlinson's Gaiety Galop express a melancholy underneath the gladness and the gaiety and the dancing doll.

It is the 20th century's adieu to the 19th, fading all too quickly in the gathering gloom of the Century of Total War. You can easily imagine these tunes being played by the dance band on the Titanic, that last, foolish boast of 19th century immortality.

The mood is so strong in some of these tunes, it doesn't matter that many of them were written much later than 1912. They hark back. But isn't that just what nostalgia does?

Violinist Anne Rapson, clarinetist John Rapson, cellist Shimon Walt, double-bassist Catherine Lofton and pianist Diana Torbert have not just jelled in their nearly 20-year encounter with this music - they have become as smooth as creamed honey.

Simon Streatfeild led the orchestra both in accompaniment and on its own. The opener, Eric Coates's Knightsbridge March, was played with crisp rhythm and the jaunty style of a bowler hat and umbrella and a skipping heart on a bright spring morning.

Robert Farnon's Westminster Waltz rang the changes on Big Ben, and Albert Ketelby's In a Monastery Garden with its bubbling bird in the percussion section and a sentimental trumpet made us giggle with its divine silliness.

The ironic, British humour of Streatfeild's introductions was just the right touch for the occasion. Still it was Diana Torbert who brought down the house with her fiery double-sixteenth note triplets in Chris Palmer's superb arrangement of Jerome Kern's Pick Yourself Up. She picked us all up. And the orchestra played brilliantly.

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