The Lloyd Webber’s take the National Liberal Club by storm with Bach!

Thanks to Yisha Xue and the Asia Circle who invited Jiaxin to perform solo Bach suites introduced by her husband Julian with brother Andrew looking and listening to the genius of J.S.Bach .

A family of musicians starting with their father, director of the London College of Music and Julian a renowned cellist and ex director of the Birmingham Conservatoire. Andrew Baron Lloyd Webber is one of the most successful writers of musicals with numerous shows playing every day of the year in theatres all over the world.

It was Julian who, with a twinkle in his eye, told us how a teenage café cellist in 1889 had stumbled upon a crumpled copy of six suites for solo cello by Bach in a book shop in his native Barcellona .

He took them home to master them and would often try them out on customers in the café in Barcellona. Word soon spread that this was no ordinary café performer and the music he played was of divine invention. Pablo Casals created the technique to play works that had lain dormant for 200 years. A story told with the same theatrical know how as his brother, reaching over the footlights with intelligence and charm .

It was left to Jiaxin to put Julian’s words into music and she proved that it is certainly true that music reaches places where words are not enough.

Two suites in G and C held the audience spellbound with these masterworks on a single instrument, that in Jiaxin’s hands became a whole orchestra .

This was not monumental Bach but the work of a composer who could bring the song and the dance to the people with the mathematical invention of a universal genius. An extraordinary range of colour and a rhythmic drive of flowing beauty. A wave of sounds played with a tension that held us spellbound as she unravelled Bach’s knotty twine with transcendental mastery, that passed unnoticed, as we were only aware of an outpouring of sumptuous sounds, with the architectural shape of a mighty Gothic cathedral.

It was the same range of sounds that she brought to a movement of a suite by Malcom Arnold played as an encore. Leaving her bow aside she she played with a pizzicato of whispered jeux perlé sounds, where we the audience were drawn in to a fantasy world of extraordinary subtlety.

The fame of Lloyd Webber filled this Lloyd George Music Room but it was Bach who won the day with many drawn by the fame of the composer of Phantom of the Opera found themselves falling in love with the solo cello of Bach .

Hats off to Yisha and the Asia Circle for enticing an audience to savour not the delights of the palette but those of the soul.