In honour of Wagner

Affectionate but not reverent, he added a little salon schmalz, and as trumpet rasped against sax, there was a hint of underneaththearches busking. With the organ keeping flippancy at bay and aching violin lines evoking Wagner's original, the result made a witty homage.

Piano replacing the organ, the rest of the concert was dedicated to melodrama, not in the modern sense of overheated sentiment but as Mozart would have understood it: a work in which music and speech intertwine, to their mutual enrichment. In that form, melodrama is more historical than current and the programme included intriguing examples by Liszt, Strauss and Wagner, the texts delivered with sly charm by Eleanor Bron.

Counterpoise, not content simply to unearth neglected pieces, had commissioned a new example, On the Edge, with music by Edward Rushton, text by Dagny Gioulami, and the ahistorical but entirely appropriate video by Syl Betulius. The theme was the terrible beauty of mountains. The video included frightening images of the deadly power of avalanches, while Gioulami's text wove narrative strands both earthbound and magical. Rushton's score struck sparks off words and pictures, making the most of the unlikely instrumental combinations. No mere accompaniment, it became an evocative drama in its own right.

Any such juxtaposition runs the risk of one element, probably the visual, dominating the others. Here the balance seemed spot on.

Counterpoise/Eleanor Bron
Charterhouse
EC1