Program note, Glasgow

Daniel Rowland plays a violin made by Lorenzo Stononi of Cremona in 1793; lan Belton's violin is by Gio. Paolo Maggini c.1615 and Jacqueline Thomas plays a cello made by Thomas Perry in 1785. Paul Cassidy plays on La Delfina viola, c.1720, courtesy of Sra. Delfina Entrecanales.

ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE BRODSKYS BACK IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Lynne Walker © 2009

The relationship between the Brodskys and Elvis Costello - string quartet and tenor — is one of the most unusual in what the singer describes as "that junkyard named `cross-over' ". It goes back a couple of decades and, while it may not have been under the spotlight recently in this country, it's never gone away. Costello first saw the Brodsky Quartet in concert in 1989 performing the complete Shostakovich String Quartets (a cycle it repeated in Glasgow earlier this month).

As he recalls, "Not only did I come away with a clearer impression of the music but also a strong sense of the love and dedication with which the quartet played it. Over the next two years I went to hear the quartet play some wonderful music: Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven and Bartok. That's the key with the Brodsky Quartet: the music coming off the page is just our starting point — in the moment of playing it the music takes on its own life. There are just as many of the qualities of edge and the nuances as there are in a rock `n' roll band."

Paul Cassidy, viola player in the Brodskys, takes up the story: "Little did Elvis know that we all admired his musicianship hugely and had been to his London concerts and bought his CDs. We discovered soul mates in each other. Unknowingly, we had developed a huge respect for each other's work. Once the connection had been made, we exchanged letters and swapped cassettes."

After a lot of talking and listening and playing, ideas began to emerge about how to explore the combination of voice and string quartet. The inspiration for The Juliet Letters came from a newspaper item about a Veronese professor who answered all letters addressed to Juliet Capulet. First came the concert performances, in 1992. The recording, made "live in the studio" followed later that year. The rest is history.

But tonight is not simply about revisiting the glory days of the nineties. Far from it, says Cassidy emphatically. There are three or four completely new titles, fresh arrangements by Costello and by Cassidy and a few surprise covers from the Costello songbook, from 1979 to the present day, dropped in to the programme. Politics, love, lies, relationships, betrayal — all the trademarks of great songs — characterise much of their joint repertoire, I suggest. "Not a bundle of laughs," chortles Cassidy. What other emotions or subjects are they exploring in this programme? "Humour," replies Cassidy firmly. "It's not all serious. We've got 31 songs on the table, as it were. That's by no means all the songs we can do and we won't play that number but we'll go above 20, say. There are a dozen or so songs that we, the Brodskys, have never performed before. The main thing is to achieve a contrast, to balance the moods and the tempi."

It will also be the first time that Costello will have played guitar with the string quartet, "adding another colour" as he puts it. Finding new combinations of sound and exploiting each other's strengths has been a feature of thenew pieces. Is there a typical working process for this long-distance collaboration? After all Costello now lives in Vancouver while the Brodskys are London-based. Is it a case of batting words and music back and forth between each other or locking themselves away in a darkened room until they've hammered out something to their satisfaction?

"After collaborating for over 17 years we know how the other works. We're in constant contact and discuss songs that might appeal and lend themselves to new treatment and how they might sit in a programme. I Thought I'd Write to Juliet is a bit of a central point," explains Cassidy, the Brodsky's resident arranger (although all four instrumentalists are involved in the process, along with Costello). "I've taken the musical motif of the siren which appears in that song so that it becomes like a motif through a group of four or five numbers, a mini-cycle."

In that particular song a cynical writer quotes the contents of a letter he has received. This "soldier's letter" was closely related to one sent to Costello by a female member of the American military during the run-up to the Gulf War. Imagine the group's surprise when that same soldier, Constance, referenced in the number, turned up backstage at the last concert they gave on their world tour of The Juliet Letters. She had finished her time in the army the previous day, heard about the concert and had travelled from the Deep South to attend it. "It was very, very spooky," says Cassidy, going on to add that she is a remarkable person.

The current repertoire ranges from folk ballads and a song by Johnny Mercer to titles which have been performed by jazz artists (Costello is married to'the jazz singer, Diana Krall) and even an early hip-hop-influenced piece, Pills and Soap from 1983. Cassidy laughs when I say that - with its low pitched, chilly vocal line and disturbing words "Children and animals two by two, Give me the needle, Give me the rope, We're going to melt them down for pills and soap" - I find it ghoulish, "It's Elvis's stab at a rap song," he says reassuringly.

The medium of string quartet and human voice is perfect in its thrilling palette of potential textures, thinks Cassidy. "There's nowhere to hide. Harmony, counterpoint, the spacing of chords and the blending of the human voice have to be perfectly executed or they don't sound completely right. Style is important and we avoid piling on vibrato or producing unwanted accents, and strive for a beautiful legato. The challenge is the need to sound good from both our perspective and that of the audience, especially if there is the sound enhancement that is sometimes necessary in a large venue. Electrics on strings involves another dimensions and it mustn't sound steely, as if we're chewing on tinfoil."

"It's not just a bunch of people playing at a tea party," says Costello, "I think it can be quite a surprise that the quartet can take a rock `n' roll song like My Mood Swings and find a way to play it without sounding gimmicky but drive it along."

In fact, My Mood Swings — which first appeared in the Coen Brothers movie, The Big Lebowski — contains the lines 'Well he looked like one of those, Who would take off his clothes, Like you would peel a tangerine.' Cassidy couldn't resist writing in a cheeky wolf-whistle — not on his viola but through puckered lips... He also likes the eccentric aunt's curt reply to a begging letter I Almost Had A Weakness to which Costello added ironic tango passages.

The tango also features, in a melancholy way, in a brand new transcription of Clive Langer's music for some of Costello's most enduring lyrics, Shipbuilding, dating from the time of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict. "I wanted to write an arrangement and have an instrumental section," says Costello. There has already been an orchestral version and Chet Baker's trumpet melodies are retained here too but in a different way. "You take the same material and you keep going back to it and getting something new out of it because the original idea that Chet came up with was so good. It's fun finding a way to make that work for string quartet."

"We also have an arrangement of Accidents Will Happen so we're going right back to the very beginning of my career." In addition, inspired by the legendary Hollywood Quartet's collaboration with Frank Sinatra, "blending like a well mixed Martini", the Brodskys and Costello have taken up, and are premiering, one of the numbers the older artists recorded in the 1950s, PS I Love You.

There's also an intense new arrangement of Costello's 2005 song Bedlam as well as Cassidy's tender setting of Costello's Oscar-nominated co-composition with T Bone Burnett, The Scarlet Tide. Composed for Alison Krauss to sing in Cold Mountain the song is so beautifully simple, says Cassidy, that he's done little more than portray the gently strumming ukulele. "I use little apreggios to give a feeling of deedle-deedle-deedle-deedle..."

Reflecting the words of a song can be a dangerous game to play, however. Who Do You Think You Are? has the line `A thousand or so tuneless violins' and, says Cassidy, "Every time we come to those words there's a strong temptation to make tuning-up noises!"

"There is a lot of humour in the show," says Costello, "and it's much more relaxed than people imagine."