Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain at SFP/Omni

UOGB at the Barbican in 2018 in a group including several of last night’s performers; the 2018 players were, left-to-right Dave Suich, Peter Brooke Turner, Hester Goodman, Ben Rouse, Richie Williams, George Hinchliffe, Leisa Rea, Will Grove White, and Jonty Bankes (photography by JodiOne, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Almost exactly a year ago, George Hinchliffe’s Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (UOGB) contributed their Ukulele Lockdown series of YouTube videos to San Francisco Performances (SFP) to provide the first of three streamed concerts to compensate for the cancellation of the 2021 PIVOT Festival. The group was founded in 1985 by Hinchliffe and Kitty Lux, the latter of whom died in 2017 due to a variety of chronic health issues. Last night UOGB made its transition from the virtual to the physical, presenting a Guitar Series recital in Herbst Theatre under the joint auspices of SFP and the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts.

Hinchliffe himself did not appear with his ensemble. The performers were (in alphabetical order) Jonty Bankes, Peter Brooke Turner, Laura Currie, Leisa Rea, Ben Rouse, Dave Suich, and Ewan Wardrop. They played instruments in a wide variety of different sizes, but the bass line was consistently maintained by Banks. Their repertoire is, for the most part, pop with occasional ventures into jazz and bluegrass. Their delivery tends to be deadpan situated on a foundation of characteristically British whimsy (assuming that whimsy still has currency on the other side of the pond).

Every now and then, however, the ensemble pulls off a stunt that is positively jaw-dropping in its intricacy. Last night’s offering began with one of the players insisting on playing the music of George Frideric Handel. This turned out, however, to be little more than a repeated ground bass line. Over the course of the performance, each of the other players superposed a popular tune on top of that bass line. The result was one of the most sophisticated quodlibets I had ever encountered with each of the seven members playing something distinctively different (and, for the most part, familiar).

Readers probably know by now that I am not particularly big on the pop genre, but it did not take long for me to get enthusiastically hooked on the UOGB approach to that repertoire.