A CONCERT organised by Platform welcomed home some of the North-East’s most famous musical exports, the Brodsky String Quartet, which started out as Teesside teenagers as the Cleveland String Quartet, and Consett-born international baritone Graeme Danby.

They gave a wide-ranging programme, from Mozart arias to Beethoven’s Op 95 Quartet, Samuel Barber’s famous Adagio and Dover Beach, the comedy and wit of Flanders and Swan and on to Tom Lehrer’s sharp-edged satire.

With pianist Lydia Newlands, Danby opened with popular Mozart arias from Figaro and The Magic Flute, delivered with impeccable style and diction, attributes he also applied to sea songs by Ireland and Warlock and to Britten’s arrangements of The Ash Grove and The Foggy, Foggy Dew for voice and string quartet, nostalgic and gently humorous respectively.

The Brodsky’s Beethoven Serioso F minor String Quartet Op 95 and Mozart’s Adagio & Fugue, K 546 were both given firmly efficient performances, followed by the gentle beauty of Barber’s Adagio from his String Quartet op 11.

The same composer’s atmospheric setting of Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach is less-often heard, here beautifully performed by Danby and the Brodsky; a little higher light level in the auditorium would have helped the audience follow the text of the poem printed in the programme.

The lighter side of the evening came with Danby’s Flanders and Swan exposition of the love lives of the sloth and armadillo and Lehrer’s When You are Old and Grey and Weiner Schnitzel Waltz, recalling the era and humour of the 1960s.

Dave Robson