Star rating: *** AS an experiment, it was a public one, with a surprisingly full Usher Hall - last-minute tickets buyers found themselves in the gallery - happy to expose themselves to whatever Martin Jacques and his colleagues in the Tiger Lillies, augmented by a Concerto Caledonia quintet and tenor Keith Lewis, chose to do to complement Jonathan Mills's Monteverdi-based programme.
What they got before the interval was Lewis, made up to look like Jacques's stage persona, giving cabaret readings of characters from the operas with the Scots band, and then the entire ensemble performing a new version of the Orpheus and Eurydice story that stretched very limited musical material over the best part of half an hour. It seemed alternately mesmerising and meandering, but the acid test is that I have no real desire to hear it again.
After the break, the two bands performed songs from the Tiger Lillies' new album Love and War. Although embracing a range of musical styles, it is one of Jacques' stylistic devices to stick to a restricted lyrical vocabulary so that rhyme signals the next line, undeleted expletives and blatant blasphemy included. Effective in Shockheaded Peter, with its litany of doomed children, here it became wearing, although the currency of trade in sex and arms was undoubtedly consistent. After a song of child molestation (with actions) and abuse of the Steinway with a foot and a dildo, it all seemed a bit desperate to offend, although very few of the audience voted with their feet. When Jacques yelled "You're a twat", however, the reply from the stalls "So are you" seemed inevitable.
The contributions of the non-Tiger Lillies (David Greenberg's fiddling, Emily White on violin and small trombone, William Carter playing theorbo like trad banjo, Alison McGillivray on cello and David McGuinness on keyboards, including the Usher Hall organ) made sense of the grand setting, but the show's stage management was as rough and ready as much of the material.
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