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A powerful enthusiasm for ideas links highly contrasting works by Ives, Gershwin, Zappa and George Lewis, in a thrilling evening conducted by Ilan Volkov.

McFall’s Chamber’s Red Blue Balance - music for chamber musicians and jazz trio, introduce three new works, revisit recent work and hark back to Bongo Club days with driving Zappa and swing band Raymond Scott pieces at Edinburgh’s Fringe.

Fabien Gabel and the Orchestre Symphonique de Quebec present inventive and colorful musical pictures by Schmitt, El-Khoury, Honegger, Zappa and Richard Strauss.

An evening of frivolousness and solemnity.

McFall’s Chamber brings a freshness to its repertoire as it revisits the Bongo Club years, and performs two newly commissioned pieces. Informal and very enjoyable.

What drew John Cage and Frank Zappa into the same programme was their mutual admiration of Edgard Varèse, at its most striking in their use of percussion. Somehow I feel Cage would have been delighted to be the one out of step with an otherwise perfectly symmetrical programme. Flanking the interval were performances of Varèse’s Ionisation (1929–31).

It would probably be a mistake to take Frank Zappa’s The Adventures of Greggery Peccary too seriously. True, musically it is highly taxing in its orchestral transcription by Ali N. Askin, and there’s absolutely no denying the seriousness of Zappa as a musician generally. But this is Zappa in full-on nonsense mode.Greggery Peccary is a pig of some sort, who works in an office, or something.

If you want something done, ask a busy person – the old adage goes. With three albums released in the last year, a recent concert of works by Gavin Bryars only one week behind them and the premier of a chamber opera (The Okavango Macbeth) scheduled for mid-April, Mr. McFall's Chamber still found time to perform two new commissions in a programme entitled, Mad March Week 2.

Dans un style audacieux et éclectique, la transposition sur la scène de l'Opéra de Nice du docu-fiction de Tony Palmer et Frank Zappa produit un spectacle insolite et réjouissant.

Trotz ungeheurer Energie in manchen Werken, gab es viele Ungereimtheiten in einem gut gemeinten Programm.