Candlelight: Tribute to The Beatles

Candlelight: Tribute to The Beatles hands a heavily covered pop songbook to a string quartet and plays it in a room lit by candles. Stripping out the voices is a real test: these are songs whose lyrics carry a large part of their reputation, so what is left has to stand on melody and harmony alone.

It largely does. The writing is unusually rich in the things strings do well, from the modal turns and abrupt key shifts of the later material to the plain, closely-voiced tunes of the early songs. The catalogue also has a string history of its own, since several of its best-known arrangements were written for quartet and octet in the first place, and a programme like this puts that inheritance in the foreground rather than treating it as a curiosity.

Played unamplified and close up, the songs slow down and open out. Countermelodies buried deep in the mix become audible lines, and pieces known mainly as records turn back into compositions. What the arrangements lose in words they recover in detail.