Music / Tenzin Choegyal & Phoenix Collective Quartet. At Wesley Uniting Church, February 18. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

THIS is what would seem, at first glance, an unlikely pairing of a traditional Tibetan singer and instrumentalist, Tenzin Choegyal, with a classical string quartet. 

They came together, almost by accident at last year’s National Folk Festival with a brief, semi-improvised set and this has led to this more formal collaboration with Choegyal’s songs and melodies accompanied by some very clever and supportive quartet arrangements by PCQ cellist Andrew Wilson.

Choegyal plays the dranyen, a long-necked Tibetan lute with a skin soundboard, using repeated melodic patterns – what a rock guitarist would call “riffs” – as the basic accompaniment. 

Around these patterns, Wilson has crafted the quartet parts following the melody and/or the rhythmic patterns, giving each of the four players the opportunity to take the lead while leaving room for some improvisation along the way. A highlight was some wonderful sliding harmonics on the strings behind a melody played by Choegyal on a bamboo flute.

Choegyal is a performer used to working in amplified settings, using microphones for voice and the dranyen rather than the purely acoustic mode more usual in the string quartet world, and I suspect his fairly quiet voice would have been lost behind the quartet. 

To offset this he used microphones through a small amplified speaker in front of him, discreetly covered with a Tibetan flag. While this brought his singing voice up to a level where it balanced well with the bowed strings, the spoken introductions were muffled and indistinct to the point where I have no idea what the performed works were called. It does not matter so much for the singing where the Tibetan words are as much sound colour as anything else, but this might have been the simplest way to adjust the imbalance.

That technical issue aside, this was an hour of very beautiful music with the ancient vocal tradition of Tenzin Choegyal accompanied sensitively and skilfully by the Phoenix Collective Quartet.