Brighton Year-Round 2026

Perello Duo Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton

Perello Duo

Genre: Live Music, Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

A paradigm of summer. The almost unique combo of guitar and vibraphone with the Perello Duo – Eleanor Kelly and Mike Hughes – arrived at St Nicholas on yet another record breaking scorch of August.

Most are adapted standards. This Gershwin’s 1935 ‘Summertime’ (it’s so hot it might be simmertime) glides in with its rapt hymn to hear and content from the start of Porgy and Bess.

It’s followed by the less-well-known ‘Here’s That Rainy Day’ by Jimmy van Heusen (1913-90).which might come as a hymn to many. It’s a beguiling arrangement.

Stairs famed ‘Gymnopédie No 1’ from 1889. It still sounds ahead of its time and naturally those torsions of ancient Greek dance are rendered exquisitely in this incarnation.

The same is the of Saint-Saens’ ‘Le Cygne’ from his 1886 Carnival of the Animals which he refused to publish in his lifetime. He knew it would eclipse all his ‘serious’ work in popularity. This piece survives a y transcription but this one is a winner

Laurie Randolph a Canadian composer born in 1952 has lived for many years in Germany. A resolutely tonal composer she writes in several genres. This Sea Suite from which excerpts are taken is for guitar, but here ingeniously expanded to include vibraphone. The Perello Duo are wholly inside this sonance, this sea conch of a world. They shushings of sea at the outset and encourage the audience to add theirs. The penultimate move went is haunted with a real dark lip of sound. And the finale is hauntingly memorable; before turning jazzy.

Carmen Guzman (1925-2012) is another composer unknown to me. I’m very glad to make their acquaintance. Guzman is someone Kelly has championed and cut a CD of. She was able to obtain colours of mass and unpublished work. With Guzman’s centenary last year this champion of musical and social movements in Argentina was lucky to survive Galtieri’s regime (and that of his predecessor’s from 1976). She’s worth celebrating and her CD seeking out.

Her ‘Tango para Billy’’ is characteristic. Written for her husband, it’s a solo of complexity and counter rhythm. A work celebrating love and a difficult world negotiated by survivors.

Guzman is rightly a favourite. Waltzes or ‘Vals’ 1,2 and 5 follow. These also distantly plummet bass-notes in the tango’s register and waft in like a haunt of Piazzolla’s world remembered in a sashay of slightly different waltz-kicks.

Then Guzman’s ‘Dedicatoria’ is another piece gently recalls a world seen through glimpses. It’s like the opening Tango though striped of complexity is haunts more singularly.

Luigi Legnani (1790-1877) though long-lived didn’t quite see the ascent of the vibraphone into a solo instrument. His ‘Caprice’ is a delicious genre piece. It’s in G flat – Hughes talks of the bottom and top Fs in his vibraphone just edging near the guitars range. It’s a fine mid-Romantic melody too.

Bruno Martino (1925-2000) is another composer I don’t know. His ‘Estate’ – meaning ‘Summer’ brings us full circle. Its suggestive of a history of Italian films and la dolce vita. Martino’s exquisite melody is rendered by the duo with the cool of a sorbet in a day of oven heat. Necessary and delicious.

An encore was demanded! A tango from an operetta The New Moon from 1929 by Sigmund Romberg (Oscar Hammerstein wrote the lyrics). ‘Softly as the morning…’ now a jazz standard. Which is instantly recognizable. Now we know where from, if we didn’t already. The Duo swig it with all its jazz accretions flying.

Highly recommended for summer everywhere. And indeed they play Hove tonight then Shoreham and elsewhere.

Published August 5, 2026 by Simon Jenner