THE DATE WASN’T IT. THE CONCERT WAS.
Best of The Beatles by Candlelight, performed by Ash Quartet
There are dates you remember because of the person, and then there are dates where the person quietly becomes irrelevant but somehow the night remains. This was the latter.
A first date took me to a Candlelight concert featuring the music of The Beatles, performed by Sydney’s Ash Quartet. By the end of the evening, I knew he wasn’t my person. I also knew the concert was absolutely brilliant.
The setting certainly helped. Hundreds of candles surrounded the quartet and spilled across the stage, creating the kind of atmosphere that makes you instinctively lower your voice as you find your seat. At the centre were four musicians, Marianne Liu and Eva Li on violin, Dana Lee on viola and Sebastian Mansell on cello.
Before they played a note, Mansell addressed something everyone in the room probably understood. There is a certain etiquette attached to watching a string quartet. You sit quietly, listen attentively and, when appropriate, offer a respectable round of applause. That wasn't going to be the mood tonight. He encouraged us to forget the restrained quartet applause and give them the kind of reception we might have given The Beatles themselves.
It was funny, self-aware and exactly what the room needed. Any sense that we were about to sit through a formal classical performance disappeared almost immediately.
The programme had promised sixteen Beatles songs, although the set shifted slightly on the night. There was I Want to Hold Your Hand, Help!, Michelle, Penny Lane, Come Together, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Blackbird, Eleanor Rigby, Here Comes the Sun, Yesterday and Hey Jude, among others. All You Need Is Love also found its way into the evening, instantly recognisable to anyone whose relationship with the song includes that wedding scene in Love Actually.
These are songs so familiar that it is easy to think there is nothing left to discover in them. Hearing them performed by a string quartet proves otherwise.
Without Lennon, McCartney or Harrison singing the words, your attention shifts to what sits beneath them. A violin carries a melody your brain expects to hear sung. The cello takes on parts you associate with bass and rhythm. Four classical string instruments somehow have to suggest the guitars, drums, vocals and textures of recordings embedded in popular culture for more than half a century.
Ash Quartet made those translations feel effortless.
Founded in 2018, the Sydney-based ensemble has performed throughout Australia and Europe and received advanced training from internationally acclaimed groups including the Emerson, Hagen, Jerusalem and Doric Quartets. Their technical ability was obvious, but what made the evening work was how little distance they placed between themselves and the audience.
Between pieces, they talked to us. There were introductions, observations and small pieces of context about what we were about to hear. Their commentary gave the performance personality and made the quartet themselves part of the experience rather than anonymous musicians moving through a Beatles set list.
Then they asked us to sing.
There is always a potentially awkward moment when performers tell an audience to join in. Everyone waits to see whether everyone else is going to do it first. But once the room started singing, it really started singing.
Suddenly, hundreds of people were singing words they already knew while four musicians played beneath them. The sound of the audience became another instrument in the arrangement. It was one of those moments that is difficult to reproduce outside a live performance because its effect comes from being surrounded by other people experiencing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.
Somewhere amongst The Beatles, Ash Quartet also gave themselves a moment to step outside the premise of the evening. They introduced a classical piece of their own choosing, and the difference was immediate.
Until then, we had been listening to string instruments recreate music written for an entirely different musical language. Violins, viola and cello had been finding ways to evoke guitars, bass, drums and voices. With the classical piece, they no longer needed to translate anything. We heard the instruments as themselves and, in turn, heard the musicians differently.
It was a clever inclusion because it quietly demonstrated just how much skill had been hiding underneath the familiarity of the Beatles arrangements. Once you had heard what these four musicians could do within their own classical world, you appreciated even more what they were doing when they returned to songs we all knew.
The evening eventually arrived at Hey Jude, perhaps the most inevitable song with which to bring a room like this together. By then, nobody needed much encouragement to participate.
What stayed with me afterwards was how refreshingly uncomplicated the whole experience had been. Four musicians, four instruments, hundreds of candles and some of the most recognisable songs ever written. No giant production was required. The musicianship carried it.
There was also something lovely about sitting in a room where your only job for the next hour was to listen. You couldn't skip Michelle because you weren't in the mood for it. You couldn't ask an algorithm for something similar. You simply waited for the next few notes and that tiny flash of recognition when you realised what they were playing.
I went to a Candlelight concert because someone took me on a date.
The date wasn't it.
The concert absolutely was.
DISCOVER ASH QUARTET
Ash Quartet is a Sydney-based string quartet featuring Marianne Liu, Eva Li, Dana Lee and Sebastian Mansell.
Website: ashquartet.com
Instagram: @ashquartet
ABOUT CANDLELIGHT
This performance was part of Candlelight, a series of live music experiences presented by Fever, bringing classical and contemporary music into candlelit venues around the world.
Explore upcoming Candlelight concerts through feverup.com.