It’s so tiresome. It’s been done so many times before. Remember The Cambridge Street Buskers playing “The Ride of the Valkyries?” Or Hoffnung’s “Sugar Plums”? No? Well, here you have an ocarina quartet playing grotesque arrangements of (among other things) the Prelude to Act 3 of Lohengrin, some Verdi (you-know-what from Rigoletto), Offenbach’s Can-Can, Schubert’s “The Trout” (the song, not the quintet, thank God for small mercies), and “greatest hits” from the finale of Beethoven’s First Symphony. Mixed in are bits of traditional music from Japan, Italy, Romania, some early stuff, and three songs by Arthur Sullivan. Is 61 minutes of this cute, appealing, or even tolerable? I suppose we should be grateful: at least they don’t attempt the Grosse Fuge.
The sound of the ocarina, sort of like a vibrato-less synthesized flute or asthmatic carnival calliope, becomes fatiguing well before even the shortest of these 23 pieces (and they are mostly very short indeed) draws to its irritating close. Put four of these little clay instruments of evil in a single ensemble and what you get isn’t so much a musical experience as the plot of a new horror flick: Child’s Play 4–Chucky and Friends Massacre the Classics. It’s simply torture, the musical analog to the excruciating whine of a high-frequency dentist’s drill buzzing along your auditory canal. It truly makes me yearn for the days several decades ago when the Temple University Kazoo Choir made the definitive statement in this genre by recording the opening of Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra. That was funny. And short. After a few minutes of this, you’ll surely want to up-chuck(erbutty).
