Presented by Adelaide Festival Centre
Reviewed 17 Feb 2017
Musicians Aidan Roberts and Daniel Holdsworth both cover a wide variety of work, including bands The Maple Trail and The Saturns, scoring film, theatre and television, and generally being awfully clever at playing lots of instruments.
It’s this latter skill that is on show in their (arguably) most popular project, Tubular Bells for Two.
Winning the 2015 Fringe award for music, the boys have an in-built and adoring audience here, and last night’s standing ovation is a testament to that.
Tubular Bells was a sprawling, Celtic-folky-rocky instrumental, released in 1973 by British musician Mike Oldfield. It was the first record recorded on the new Virgin label, and Richard Branson was told the piece was “unmarketable”: instead, it became a monster hit. Oldfield plays over twenty different instruments on the piece, but with the help of multi-track recording. Holdsworth and Roberts, in a moment of madness, decided to do it live, with only two of them juggling keyboards, guitars, mandolins and the eponymous tubular bells.
The musicianship in this performance is unquestionable. This is a piece which begs to be played live and loud. But the boys add something more to it, with their strong stage presence. At one point Holdsworth even forgot a particular passage, but managed to make that a moment, by jokingly acknowledging the stuff-up to the audience. A short break between the two “sides” of the album, allowed Holdsworth to further engage with the audience, in his relaxed and personable style. Due to the amount of juggling involved, the two perform barefoot, and prance around the stage from drums to bells to keyboards and back again, making this as much a visual treat as an auditory one.
Surprisingly, there were a few audience members last night who admitted to never having heard the original, and they seemed to love it as much as the die-hard baby-boomers.
This performance is a master-class in stage-craft, musicianship and passion.
Ring dem bells!
Reviewed by Tracey Korsten
Twitter: @TraceyKorsten
Rating out of 5: 5
Season ended
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