Candlelight: Tribute to Michael Jackson

Candlelight: Tribute to Michael Jackson rebuilds a tightly engineered pop catalogue for string quartet, played in a room lit by candles. The songs were written for a voice with a percussive attack and for arrangements in which every element is locked to the groove, so four bowed instruments have to find another way in.

They find it in the writing underneath. The bass lines are melodic enough to carry as cello parts, the horn stabs and synth pads move straight to the inner strings, and the vocal hooks, built from short repeated cells rather than long lines, survive being handed to a violin. What disappears is the rhythm section, so the quartet supplies the drive through articulation instead: chopped bowing, hard accents, and rests placed exactly where the drum machine used to sit.

Heard unamplified and close up, the effect is to expose how much of this music is chords and counterpoint rather than production. Songs that live in memory as sound and spectacle come back as pieces with harmony, structure and a middle eight. That is the argument the programme makes, and it makes it without a word being sung.