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October 11, 2005
Wahey! dedicated to
some of the various forms that Scottish music has developed into over
the decades.It was an appropriate show for my Savoy christening,
especially since it opened with Glace Bay fiddle scholar WinnieChafe,
with her daughter Patricia Chafe a respected educator in her own right
on piano and Kim Lance on viola di I've wondered if there was a grey area between classical and chamber music and traditional Scottish fiddle, and Lance's viola provided the answer, adding an earthy sonorous tone to the first jig, anchoring Chafe's skilled counter rhythm fiddling. Chafe and company got the audience participation going when couples began waltzing in the aisles to the sweet flowing medley of a trio of tunes written by Chafe while on the long ferry ride home from Argentia, Nfld. Her reputation as an instructor was confirmed by a tidy three-tune lesson in Scottish fiddle history, starting with J. Scott Skinner's Mull Hills, followed by Neil Gow's Lament For His Second Wife and his son Nathaniel Gow's Fairy Dance. The latter tune has rarely sounded so sprightly as Chafe's clear intonation danced the melody up and down. Heading back to the old country for something more contemporary, guitarist and singer Ivan Drever, with fiddler Duncan Chisholm, performed a mix of instrumental and vocal tunes, starting with The Rose of St. Magnus, written for the dedication of a new stained glass window at home in the Orkney Islands. The contemplative piece benefitted from Drever's strong vibrato tone and delicately shaded fingerwork.
Then Drever introduced
"someone I've known for a very long time," his son Kris, also on hand to
accompany accordionist Phil Cunningham. Together the trio played an old
English folk song, leading into some jigs, with the lockstep playing of
Chisholm and the younger Drever providing the hypnotic backdrop for the
senior Drever's rounded
From this intimate
trio the concert changed gears radically with Cape Breton tenor Peter
Gillis performing elaborately orchestrated renditions of island
favourites like Out on the Mira and Robert Burns' Rattling Roaring
Willie. Gillis is a talented singer, with an expressive voice that he
uses in a number of dramatic ways, but the high gloss production with
seven-piece band and backup vocal trio felt at odds with the rest of the
concert. Still, he pulled out all the stops in a version of Alistair
MacGillivray's Arm of Gold that had the audience on its feet; a little
dose of show biz never killed anybody. There was a whole lineup of spitfires on stage later that night at the SAERC Auditorium in Port Hawkesbury for the annual Celtic Women showcase, starting with Gaelic scholar and longtime friend of Celtic Colours Margaret Bennett, who opened with a song of welcome in the mother tongue before lending her delicate soprano to an unrequited love song. "Most ballads are unrequited because unrequited lovers have more time to write songs," noted Bennett before a tune from the Outer Hebrides about a forlorn woman who will write her love using "the blood from my heart because it is warmer than ink." How romantic can you get? Former Cherish the Ladies vocalist Cathie Ryan brought a sunny personality and a soft, pretty voice to ballads like Karine Polwart's Follow the Heron Home and As the Evening Declines, an almost country-ish meditation on a woman in her elder years who still has strong appetites. With the darker colourings of Hanneke Cassel's fiddle and Greg Anderson's guitar, the Irish-American singer found the strong thread running through John Spillane's The Wild Flowers, dedicated to the independent streak that runs through Irish and Scottish women who, like the blooms in the woods, flourish without the cultivation required for the rose or lily.
Recent St. F.X. grad
Kimberley Fraser brought her bright, confident playing to a wide-
anging set that included strathspeys, reels, clogs and hornpipes,
abetted by the fleet fingers of Margaree Forks' Brian Doyle on guitar. A
technically superb player, Fraser throws in enough downhome grit to get
under the skin of her tunes and make them Celtic Women ended with two very different overseas visitors, starting with Danish vocal duo Karen and Helene, whose a capella interpretation of Northern European folk tradition is one of the most striking sounds in the whole festival. Karen Mose's savory alto blends with Helene Blum's airy soprano for tunes inspired by the songs of birds or the multilayered tapestry of the Norwegian hardanger fiddle, inspiring any number of mental fairy tales in the listener's mind's eye. Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell brought the lower register of her bellows-powered bagpipes in a husky mix of reeds and strings, with button accordionist Julian Sutton, fiddler Peter Tickell and guitarist Ian Stephenson. Playing a tune inspired by the stream running behind her house, Tickell was able to interpret its twists and turns, slowing down around rocks and picking up speed on the hill, with great sensitivity, while she also displayed her skills on the fiddle with a set of tunes that was not only fast but, dare I say it?, lickety split.
For the finale, Ryan
led the ensemble through a heartfelt The Parting Glass, an encouraging
way to send the crowd off in search of a little libation of their own.
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