Music

Kosmos Ensemble

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

FOUR STARS

The Soundhouse Monday concert series in the Traverse bar is bringing both high quality and great variety to what’s often written off as a dead night for music promotions. Folk, jazz and Americana aficionados are all well catered to and this latest instalment added ostensibly chamber music but with a whole lot more - a world tour, in fact, on the final scheduled number, although we’d already covered quite a lot of the globe by then with major verve and musicality.

With Serbian accordionist Miloš Milivojevi? at the heart of the trio, it’s no surprise that Eastern European scales and metres feature strongly in the Kosmos repertoire. Violinist Harriet Mackenzie and violist Meg Hamilton are entirely in sympathy with Milivojevi?’s native folklore and the way the three of them work together, seamlessly swapping melodic and accompanist roles can be as breath-taking as it is moving.

Each piece is arranged for maximum dramatic effect, with much percussive use of the bows and attacking energy but also with superb restraint and fluency and a genuinely emotional engagement in Mackenzie and Hamilton’s melting glissandi.

The violist’s intro to the theme from Schindler’s List, one of several popular pieces to get a Kosmos customization (Piazzolla’s Libertango was another notable success later), was beautifully articulated with a marvellously flowing gracefulness and the dynamic range Milivojevi? brought to his playing on a Romanian hora in particular, from brooding, distant cathedral organ-like tones to high octane shaking, was both deeply impressive and brilliantly effective. A Japanese folksong presented as a kind of tone poem-cum-nature sketch and a soulful Turkish-Bosnian medley emphasised the imagination and scope at work in an uncommonly accomplished group.