Music / “Incy Wincy & Friends: strings eccentric, rhapsodic and sleepy”, Musica da Camera. At Gundaroo Soldiers Memorial Hall, September 10. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

AS the title suggests, there was a distinctly tongue-in-cheek feel to Sunday’s Musica da Camera concert conducted by David Pereira.

A showbag of pleasurable offerings, the works chosen, cellist Margaret Kahn told the audience, because they felt like doing them.

The dramatic opening featured Pereira, easy and comfortable as soloist, who with ensemble, played the showpiece, David Popper’s Romani-inspired “Hungarian Rhapsody.”

Linked to the Popper by its inspiration in folk music, the second work was Max Bruch’s “Serenade for Strings after Swedish Folk songs”. Here Pereira took the baton.

These first two works were performed with energy and verve but were a little overpowering in the tiny Gundaroo hall.

The program then turned whimsical as the musicians played three classical pieces used in ABC TV’s “Bluey” – Boccherini’s “Minuet and Trio” from his String Quintet in E Major, Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” and Dinicu’s “ Hora Staccato”, played when Bluey and Bingo attack their dad.

It was, as Pereira said, a wonderful way to introduce the young children in the audience to classical music.

The centrepiece of the afternoon was Pereira’s own composition, “Variations on Incy Wincy Spider”, in which he has taken the nursery rhyme and used it as a basis for atmospheric music, divided into segments.

With teasing titles such as “Very Scary Spider”, the string players and especially the bassists, Geoff Prime and Kate Murphy, got to play very weird sounds running the gamut of a string orchestra’s potential – they could hardly wipe the smiles off their faces.

Proof that Pereira was partly having us on was to be found in his printed program notes, where his spoof of pompous concert notes, tells us his composition is “a boldly innovative tool in the treatment of ODD (Octopedal Dysphoria Disorder). You won’t find that in the dictionary.

There followed, in marked contrast, the smooth and melodic “Lullaby” by George Gershwin, composed when he was only 21. This was a pleasing interlude before whimsy took over again.

Pereira is not the only composer capable of indulging in a bit of tongue-in-cheek. Prokofiev does much the same thing in “Images Fugitives”, his cycle of 20 miniatures of which nine were played in the concert.

The titles he gave each interlude speak for themselves, such as “Con eleganza”, “Ridicolosamente” and Pereira’s favourite, “Inquieto”, meaning “somewhat disturbing”.

This concert, which proved accessible to both children and adults, wound up with Prokofiev’s fearsome finale, “Feroce”.