VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Art Club

The art deco gallery interior of Glasgow Art Club provided an apposite setting for the intimate flute-guitar coupling of the Meraki Duo. This Westbourne Music recital by the young British duo – Meera Maharaj on flute, James Girling on guitar – also happened to be their first ever Scottish appearance, marking the start of a wider Scotland/UK tour that culminates with the launch of their debut Delphian album in September. It was a programme perfectly suited to the lunchtime slot: light, varied, charming, even revelatory in the rare choice of repertoire.

Much of that required adaptation for this specific combo, clearly a role enjoyed by Girling, whose arrangements of works by William Grant Still, Dominique Le Gendre and Olivier Messiaen projected a personal imprint on the performances. 

Still’s Three Songs (he was an American composer who played in Blues legend W C Handy’s band, but studied composition with Varèse) echoed the composer’s eclectic tendencies, combining soft “soirée” appeal – emphasised by the oaken sensuousness of Maharaj’s alto flute – with a deftness of simple construction. Le Gendre’s Songs and Dances of the Island’s Suite, inspired by his Trinidad and Tobago heritage, upped the vibe, not least in the animated and exotically-coloured Biguine. Especially fascinating were the three miniatures selected from Messiaen’s 5 Leçons de solfège, essentially pedagogical works, yet masterfully conceived in a manner more akin to the fluid brushstrokes of Debussy than the composer’s more ecstatic modernist signature.

Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea for alto flute and guitar, written for Greenpeace in the 1980s with inspiration from Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, was equally illustrative of that composer’s more tonal proclivities. Its three sections – Moby Dick, The Night and Cape Cod – were warmly embraced by a performance honouring the music’s mellifluous sweep and undulating dynamic. Again, the voluptuousness of the alto flute was spell-binding, entwined with the expressive dexterity of Girling’s versatile guitar.

To close, the Duo turned to Bosnian guitarist/composer Miroslav Tadić’s Four Macedonian Pieces for alto flute and guitar. Besides evoking the folk essence of these songs and dances, Maharaj and Girling struck a convincing balance between the sardonic and the ebullient. In response to the reflectiveness of the song-based Zajdi, Zajdi, the quintuple-time Pajdushka bristled with energy. The melancholic undertones of Jovka Kumanovka were swiftly swept aside by the wild Bagpiper’s dance Gajdarsko Oro, a fitting finale to Meraki’s enjoyable Scottish debut.

Ken Walton 

Other Scottish performances by the Meraki Duo are at West Kilbride (20 Feb), Hawick Music Club (21 Feb) and Moffat Music Society (22 Feb). Further details at https://meeramaharaj.co.uk/meraki-duo