Despite having been a familiar London face for more than 20 years, Alexander Balanescu is Romanian from his boot heels to his black fedora. On his 1994 album Luminitza, he grasped his eastern European roots by the lapels and gave them a good shake.
With this current string of performances and their forthcoming album, Maria T, the Balanescu Quartet are travelling further behind the old iron curtain, wringing out the legacy of Romanian actress and singer Maria Tanase via a cluster of new compositions inside some artful mixed- media wrapping.
Balanescu reckons Tanase's songs "embody the essential spirit of Romanian poetry and philosophy", and his new music reeks of gypsy dances and folk songs, even while it spins them in a digital blender.
When the Highbrow Brigade blunder around in what they laughably call "video art", the results usually resemble something the advertising industry deemed obsolete in 1951. But some happy intuition led Balanescu to recruit Austrian video whizz Klaus Obermaier. While permitting himself the occasional surrealistic jeu d'esprit - the show opens with an infinitely multiplying flock of digitised sheep, and ends with Balanescu-style hats spinning in space - Obermaier displays an innate sympathy with the music's delicate mix of nostalgia, lyricism and fantasy.
The concluding sequence of a house and garden, rendered in naive brush strokes, while a 50s-style car repeatedly passes by, mixes with the quartet's prodding rhythmic counterpoints to stir a strange and intangible mix of emotions. Recordings of Tanase's voice and images of her face are finely woven through the performance.
Balanescu likes to control the emotional temperature by simple addition or subtraction of overlapping patterns, sometimes calling down a percussion bombardment from Steve Arguelles for special emphasis. Only towards the end does the quartet really stretch its wings.
It's hard to say what it all means, but the emotional impact is inescapable.
· At Bracknell South Hill Park Arts Centre (01344 484123) tonight. Then touring.
