Away from the day job, I serve on the board of an organisation that promotes chamber music where we have sometimes struggled with that label as potentially off-putting to an undiscovered audience for small concerts featuring classical instrument and art songs.
I am coming to the conclusion, however, that the world may be moving towards the term, because its inference of sonic quality and precision of performance is ideal to describe something as highly polished as this show by seasoned songsmith Kathryn Williams. And there was some - slightly tetchy - banter at the expense of the sound engineer at one point, which only served to illustrate that.
Superficially, the presence of cellist Ben Trigg, who wrote the excellent string arrangements on the new Crown Electric album, was the obvious link. He is a very fine player indeed, exploiting the full range of the instrument to go from plucked jazz bass to a solo you'd have assumed was a viola if you weren't watching him. But there was more to the performance of this trio (completed by David Page on guitar and beautifully pitched backing vocals) than the presence of one-quarter of a string quartet that suggested a chamber recital. In the challenging acoustic of the Oran Mor basement, Williams mixed some older songs with the pick of her new disc and made one wonder why she has not found much bigger stages for songs of the quality of Gave It Away, Monday Morning and Radio 2 favourite Heart Shaped Stone.
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