Candlelight: Tribute to Queen & The Beatles

Candlelight: Tribute to Queen & The Beatles puts two of pop's most demanding songbooks in the same programme and gives both to a string quartet playing by candlelight. The two bands sit at opposite ends of a shared inheritance, and hearing them one after another makes that inheritance audible.

Queen wrote in blocks: stacked vocal harmony, abrupt changes of key and tempo, and sections that behave more like movements than verses. Four instruments can take that on directly, because the material was already conceived as counterpoint rather than as a band groove. The Beatles wrote the other way round, from tune outward, with harmonic sidesteps hidden inside songs simple enough for anyone to hum; a quartet brings those sidesteps to the surface.

Stripped of amplification and heard close up, both catalogues lose the studio and keep the architecture. The theatrical material turns out to be genuinely contrapuntal, the plain material turns out to be less plain than it sounds, and the programme works as a comparison rather than as a medley.