There is no more appropriate venue for Icon Strings’ one-hour instrumental concert Musicals by Candlelight than the Actors Church in Covent Garden, the performance overlooked by the plaques and memorials to great theatre contributors including Alan Jay Lerner whose number I Could Have Danced All Night from My Fair Lady co-written with composition partner Frederick Loewe is one of the highlights of the show. Containing a baker’s dozen of musical tributes, the latest concert from this string quartet, available exclusively via TodayTix, proves a rousing celebration of the genre.
With Kirsten Jenson on the cello, Nathalie Green-Buckley on the viola, Sophie Lockett on the violin and lead violinist Haru Ushigusa, Icon Strings certainly earns their reputation as high-quality chamber musicians. Surrounded by the titular candles, the show is otherwise simply staged, the musicians arranged in a tight circle close to the audience where the focus can be entirely on the songs and the atmospheric performance which delivers a varied programme of musical theatre numbers that has been selected with care and arranged to suit the intimate grandeur of the church.
The song choices are unexplained but mix classic musical theatre which has an original orchestral basis from Leonard Bernstein and David Newman, Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber with more contemporary shows with a pop foundation by Justin Paul and Benj Pasek, Marc Shaiman and Abba. The joy of Musicals by Candlelight is the respect shown to all forms and styles of musical theatre, blended together here and given the same Icon Strings treatment, a reminder of the emotive power of musicals to inspire a depth of feeling from one song that drama can take hours to replicate.
Of the numbers originally composed for a bigger orchestra sound, One Hand One Heart from West Side Story is a highlight, spiritually beautiful in this space, and quickly followed by Memory from Cats taking the audience in a more rueful direction. Lloyd Webber recurs later in the show with Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, the string quartet exploding into the grand sound of this piece from Evita before the richness of A Little Night Music’s Send in the Clowns which is equally luscious.
And the modern musicals sound just as good, perhaps even more interesting to hear them take on a more classical form. Gimme, Gimme, Gimme from Mamma Mia is extraordinarily intricate, and as Abba is notoriously difficult to sing, it also requires the complex layering of the four instruments to create that distinctive sound. Hairspray’s You Can’t Stop the Beat is also fiendishly fast-paced, challenging the performers who admirably rise to the occasion. With songs from Dear Evan Hansen, The Lion King and 9 to 5, Icon Strings have searched widely for this varied and interesting playlist.
The songs are introduced, giving the audience a storypoint summary to frame each performance but it would enhance Musicals by Candlelight to understand more about the song selection, how they fit together and what themes or inferences the musicians draw from the choices they have made. There are debates to have on the way home about the inclusion of The Greatest Showman among an otherwise stage musical-focused playlist and the absence of Rodgers and Hammerstein is striking given the superb reinvigoration of their work in recent years, but this one-hour concert is a treat, a chance to appreciate the scores that make musical theatre such a powerful force.
Runs until 9 December 2023
