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Eyes glaze and mouths burst into gaping yawns at the thought of pop stars snooting it up with string quartets. But Elvis Costello's collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet at Town Hall Thursday was anything but the expected self-important reach.
Instead, the generous, two-hour-plus performance owed as much to Victor Borges classical camp as it did to chamber music or Kurt Weill's art-pop. With his frequently satiric gestures and witty spoken introductions, Costello injected a lively theatricality into pieces from his just-released experiment with the Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters. While on album their dalliance can seem an embalmed conceit, live it proved a wild exercise.
Ingeniously, The Juliet Letters comprises 20 missives dreamed up by Costello and the quartet to reveal a variety of bizarre characters. Using printed forms ranging from a suicide note and love letter to junk mail and graffiti, Costello and the quartet sketched characters who tend toward the dejected or deranged. As Costello put it, many are "several chips short of a fish dinner."
Which can make for riotous results. Like the mean aunt in "I Almost Had a Weakness," who snarlingly writes back to her relatives: "Thank you for the flowers / I threw them in the fire / and burned the photographs you enclosed / God, they were ugly children."
There's also a terrifically absurd chain letter ("This Offer Is Unrepeatable") that includes promises for this life and the next, plus a chilling note from a child ("Why?") that's composed entirely of questions.
Costello's vocal delivery throughout was so vivid one could practically envision the penmanship of each letter — capturing every scrawl, smudge or elegant flair. As a singer, Costello has never displayed such control or so pitched a sense of drama. His crescendo on "Taking My Life in Your Hands" was breathtaking. And his delivery of the suicide note, "Dear Sweet Filthy World," was realistically discomforting.
The four string players equaled his wit, sensitivity and creeping sense of terror.
Small wonder the audience cheered the new work as mightily as they would a cherished hit. Rewarding their attention. Costello did offer one song from his past, "Almost Blue," his homage to Chet Baker.
As if not wanting the night to end, he and the group went on to offer seven encores, including a gorgeous take on Jerome Kern's "They Didn't Believe Me," a witty spin on the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" (which Costello introduced as "an old California sea chanty") and a brittle interpretation of Weill's "Lost in the Stars."
Each underscored the same point; that Costello can enliven material from wherever his ravenous curiosity takes him.
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