THE IKARO QUARTET play Coldplay

THE IKARO QUARTET play Coldplay

The Camel House, Lanzarote 18 10 2024

review by Norman Warwick

The Camel house is a unique and intriguing venue for special concerts here on Lanzarote. On Monday 28th October we published a history of the place that is now a palatial home, with courtyards, a music auditorium and fantastic sea views. Its only drawback is that the final approach to the place is along half a km of narrow, unlit single lane, cliff top road that leads into a car park cul de sac. You can check it out online how Sir Ernest Hall began the many series of classical concerts that have been held at the venue, now under a new ownership seemingly intent on continuing the concert tradition.

However, as the couple who now own The Camel House, introduced tonight´s guests, it became apparent that whilst perpetuating Sir Ernest´s legacy, they might also be enhancing it with some daring music selections.

The Ikaro Quartet, are a string quartet from Tenerife dedicated to the dissemination of classical and modern music in all its breadth.

Tonight´s performers were certainly a quartet of talented young musicians who allowed their classical training to inform an interpretation of the music of Coldplay. After the host had given us all a warm welcome from the stage, she introduced the four musicians of The Ikaro Quartet. The artists, looking casually chic in their all black ensembles entered the stage by walking through the audience. They were led by  Juan Manuel Diaz (Violin 1) who, once on stage, introduced his female colleagues as Iballa Suarez (Violin 2), Ewa Moszczynska (Viola)  and Kathleen Balfe (Cello).

These young happy, smiley people presented us with a sixty minute celebration of Coldplay. There were twelve pieces that all fit perfectly (though some might argue the technicalities of that) into this classical instrumental environment.

There were some delightful techniques to be heard, from the percussive use of a bow on cello that gave it a driving force, and the pretty pizzicato playing on  violin 2 and the viola.  It is interesting to recall that, although we think of this fusion of popular and classical music as being a new phenomenon, these same techniques were instructed to his session men by Buddy Holly when he recorded songs like Raining In My Heart back in the nineteen fifties.

The opening Coldplay song from The Ikaro Quartet tonight was the appropriately named Speed Of Sound, with a melody borne on a heavenly zephyr.

From tracks like Yellow and Fix You there were more soaring melodies that served to extend the beautiful riffs that we hear throughout Coldplay´s repertoire. On Fix You, especially, the cello was the driving force for all the music.

Juan and his colleagues introduced every title before playing a piece and I thought it spoke very well of them that they attributed this work to its composers whilst also identifying its influences from classical music.

Paradis had a skippy, charming rhythm with the first violin offering a floaty underlay and the second violin offering pizzicato steps.

Something For You had a gorgeous opening few bars of solo violin and Yellow was denoted by a distinctive cello section, whilst My Universe included percussive strikes on both violin and cello.

The Science somehow conjured up the pastoral and the pragmatic and Sky Full Of Stars somehow spoke of the manner in which these pieces were complementing.

The closing number was, of course, Viva La Vida that holds a melody I hum in the car whenever I´m living the good life by driving my car on the Lanzarote roads.

As the final note of this piece rose to the rafters the audience, as one, rose to their feet, to offer a stading ovation. This had been a triumph.

More to the point, it had been only the first of two performances in this same venue on successive evenings. I would have loved to have attended the second concert, too, with The Ikaro Quartet offering us a celebration of Queen. However, we had a previous commitment to another event elsewhere where on the island.

That´s the only problem on the Lanzarote arts scene. If you want to see everything, there are so many gigs and so little time that, like Queen themselves, we find oursleves Under Pressure to accommodate them all.

In fact, the very next morning a Camel House newsletter dropped into our inbox.

It announced that ´after a successful concert weekend, we are once again offering you two concerts on two consecutive days on 31 October and 1 November.

Both concerts will feature French and Argentinian (Astor Piazzolla) works, one by cellist Anna Maria Niemiec and pianist Piotr Koscik.

The other will be delivered  by a trio violinist Iya Zhmaeva, clarinettist Pablo Blanco and pianist Javier Díaz

The above trio are artists resident on Lanzarote and we have heard them play many times before. It will nevertheless, be fantastic to hear them performing in such a unique venue as The Camel House.

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