Page 103 - FINAL_CBSO Media Highlights - Sept 2021 - Jan 2022_Neat

Hockley Social Club is the new, permanent Brum-based home for street-food stalwarts
Digbeth Dining Club. Founded almost a decade ago, Digbeth Dining Club has brought its
signature street food events to myriad Midlands venues, including the ruins at Coventry
Cathedral and the stunning grounds of Warwick Castle. Setting up in slightly less lofty
surroundings, the group behind DDC have managed to make a large warehouse space in
the back streets of Hockley feel classy, cool, and genuinely cosy.

Introduced by violinist Colette Overdijk, the quartet performed a variety of pieces , both from the
classical canon and more modern voices. Opening with an arrangement by Michael Atkinson of
Indie Singer/Songwriter Sufjan Stevens’s Year of the Boar, the quartet at once showed their
innate musicianship, performing with synergy and passion. American composer Caroline
Shaw’s Entr’acte was a beautiful piece full of rich and unexpected harmonies, which ended with
a perfectly balanced pizzicato cello solo from Arthur Boutillier.

Playing a couple of movements from Anna Meredith’s Songs for the M8, the quartet in the first
movement managed, rather gorgeously, to conjure up the horrible sounds of ceaseless traffic,
while the fourth movement, with its higher pitches, seemed to embody the sheer annoyance of
being on the motorway. The final piece of the first set was, to be honest, the only real low-light for
me. A very nice arrangement of a very nice song (Sigur Rós’s Hoppipolla) was played very
nicely. There was nothing at all wrong with it, but it wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a
television advert for a high-street bank, and after such innovative programming felt like a bit of a
damp squib to conclude the set.
Another of Atkinson’s arrangements of Sufjan Stevens’s songs opened the second set. Year of
our Lord was played with expertly precice glissandi, all four players working as one to tease out
the harmonies. The second movement from Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet had a strong
and fiery drive, before the quartet seamlessly moved into Bach’s Art of Fugue with an equal
intensity yet a stiller tone and a cooler passion. The same rawness was heard in the violins at the