There are some new updates and additions to the website which we hope is of interest.

The new interview section contains some cracking pieces contributed by Ally White, Karine Polwart, Paddy Callaghan and the most recent from Anderson, McGinty, Webster, Ward & Fisher. We’ll be adding more every week so keep checking for these. Read more here http://www.hebceltfest.com/festival/interviews

An overview of the complete Hebcelt programme can be viewed at http://www.hebceltfest.com/festival/glance.

Stage splits / timings are now available from http://www.hebceltfest.com/festival/times.

And finally important information about our ongoing efforts at greening the festival and a fantastic new project that we hope you all help us out with on the day. We are the only festival in Scotland to be hosting these Recycle & Reward machines http://www.hebceltfest.com/backstage/greening, your assistance in helping us recycle as much as we can will be rewarded by some fantastic prizes.

Enough reading for one day.

We will be open on Church Street on Saturdays, 15th and 22nd June, and then open fulltime from Monday, 24th June. Please come in and collect your tickets if you stay locally or check out our merchandise. We aim to have this available online shortly.

You can also book online from http://www.hebceltfest.com/booking or by calling us on 01851 621234.

And finally keep up with us on Facebook and / or Twitter for all the latest news in the run up to the event.

For all local area information remember to check out http://www.visitouterhebrides.co.uk

Source: Hebridean Celtic Festival

Three stages of entertainment, enough Thistly Cross cider and Williams Brothers beer to fuel even the most epic of expeditions, delicious food including this year’s pop-up restaurant from the incredible Pamela Brunton, head chef at The Painting School and a whole host of other fantastical distractions – most notably, YOU!

Saturday tickets have already SOLD OUT!

So don’t dilly-dally or the ride will leave without you…

Full details at http://www.insiderfestival.com

The Insider >>> Edinburgh

Official Warm Up at The Voodoo Rooms

Tuesday 28 May 2013

8pm-1am

Tickets £12

With just under a month to go until The Insider, we thought it only proper to venture out of our cosy confines of Inshriach and bring a top-drawer delegation to do our bit for international relations.

As well as our wonderful hosts, Adam Holmes and the Embers, the enchanting Siobhan Wilson and our Very Special award-winning guests there’s all sorts of other nonsense to look forward to!

The party will be carrying on til 1am with -YET ANOTHER- Special Guest kicking off the dancefloor and some Insider DJ favourites taking you Around The World in… a bunch of tunes.

Source: Insider Festival

The Southern Fried Festival line up has been finalised and Scotland’s sixth festival of American roots music is ready to roll!

The Mavericks headline the Southern Fried Festival in Perth from Friday 19 to Sunday 21 July. Other major acts include Patty Griffin, Shelby Lynne, Bettye LaVette, Darrell Scott and Danny Thompson, Tom Russell and Larkin Poe and the first ever UK visit from The McCrary Sisters.

Two sisters in soul, jazz and country open the Southern Fried Festival on Friday 19 July in Perth Concert Hall. Shelby Lynne’s confessional and eclectic classic I Am Shelby Lynne earned her a Grammy as Best New Artist. Her distinctively southern blend of soul, pop, country, blues and jazz has established her as one of the most consistently fascinating artists on the American music scene. She is joined by one of the great soul voices of our time. Now enjoying a well-deserved renaissance after 50 years in the business, Bettye LaVette’s colourful personal and professional life is expressed powerfully in her eclectic choice and emotional interpretation of songs.

Late and Southern Fried in Perth Theatre from 10.45pm on Friday 19 July features “Titan of the Telecaster”; Grammy nominated guitarist, singer and songwriter Bill Kirchen and “one of Scotland’s best kept secrets” – Roddy Hart. Bill Kirchen celebrates an American musical tradition where rock ‘n’ roll and country music draws upon its origins in blues and bluegrass, rockabilly, Western swing from Texas and California honky-tonk. Glaswegian singer/songwriter Roddy Hart invites comparisons with greats such as Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, and is gaining a growing reputation for his live shows with his band, The Lonesome Fire.

Festival-goers can “dance the night away” on Saturday 20 July when The Mavericks play a standing gig in Perth Concert Hall. Back on tour with a new album, the country-steeped garage band with their Cuban American lead singer brings an infectious energy and robust sound to make them one of the most exciting live acts from any musical genre. They are supported by one of the hottest new indie bands around; David Wax Museum.

Southern Fried brings Nashville’s The McCrary Sisters to the UK for the first time for Late and Southern Fried in Perth Theatre on Saturday 20 July. The daughters of the late Rev. Samuel McCrary – one of the original members of the legendary gospel quartet The Fairfield Four – The Sisters have appeared on Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin’s spiritual albums, with Mike Farris and Bob Dylan and on the new Mavericks album among many other credits. They stepped into the spotlight in their own right with their excellent debut album Our Journey two years ago, and their new record All The Way is a triumphant blend of classic gospel, funk, blues and soul, most of it written by the Sisters. They are joined by Perth’s own The New Madrids.

Playing for the first time in the UK for a number of years, Patty Griffin is joined on Sunday 21 July in Perth Concert Hall by star of Transatlantic Sessions Darrell Scott (and fellow bandmate in Robert Plant’s Band of Joy) with legendary bassist Danny Thompson. An iconic figure in the Americana music scene, Patty Griffin’s singing is as unmistakable and inimitable as her songwriting. Among the many artists who’ve recorded her songs are the Dixie Chicks, Bette Midler, and Emmylou Harris.

Darrell Scott is not only one of the finest songwriters in Nashville, but a stunning singer, a phenomenal guitar player and a gifted multi-instrumentalist to boot. A hit at last year’s Southern Fried Festival, he brings along his great friend and legendary bassist Danny Thompson of John Martyn, Richard Thompson and Nick Drake fame.

The powerful emotional punch, vast scope and sheer precision of Tom Russell’s work rank him high among the great American writers of our time irrespective of genre. He is joined for a Saturday afternoon gig at Perth Theatre by AJ Roach who showcased the breadth of his talent at the Johnny Cash: Songwriter concert at last year’s Southern Fried Festival.

Known for presenting acts whose music meets at the boundaries of indie, folk and roots, Hazy Recollections present their first show outside Glasgow in a free Twa Tams gig on Saturday afternoon where David Wax Museum, AJ Roach and Little Fire will be joined by nouveau rockers The Holy Ghosts with a specially Americanised set from Findlay Napier and the Bar Room Mountaineers.

Sunday afternoon’s Perth Theatre show features 21 and 22 year old duo Larkin Poe – Rebecca and Megan Lovell. Their tight vocal harmonies and dizzying instrumental riffs range from folk-rock to acoustic R&B and from contemporary country to delicate singer-songwriter. They are joined by Brennen Leigh who injects a mix of classic country and bluegrass with contemporary relevance.

This year’s Sunday Gospel Brunch is bigger and better than ever before and features an auditorium performance with The McCrary Sisters, Larkin Poe, The Gospel According to Mr Niz and Southern Fried Voices.

Visiting musicians can join local performers in the intimate surrounds of the Greyfriars Bar for festival fixture the Southern Fried Open Mic.

Festival director Andy Shearer said:

“2013 is a year of returning Southern Fried favourites! Raul Malo’s 2011 gig in Perth Theatre totally rocked and we are delighted to invite him back to the main stage along with souped-up Mavericks bolstered by key members of his own band. There was a huge buzz around Darrell Scott’s performances at the Johnny Cash celebration and his solo gig last year with many fans declaring this their all-time Southern Fried highlight. This led us to break with convention and ask Darrell back for an encore just one year down the line, especially as this time he’ll be joined by legendary acoustic bassist Danny Thompson!

“We are delighted, as well, to welcome some musicians who haven’t graced our shores for the longest time – Patty Griffin, whose recent album features Robert Plant, Bettye LaVette who is enjoying the most extraordinary career surge after fifty years in the business and the incredibly talented Shelby Lynne, We’re particularly pleased that Southern Fried is bringing the incredible McCrary Sisters to the UK for the very first time. They’re the go-to black gospel singers in Nashville and have sung on countless records including the new Mavericks release.

“As ever with Americana, it is all about the song, and, with the breadth and depth of artists we have lined up for Southern Fried 2013, we are looking forward, once again to sharing an unforgettable festival experience.”

BBC Radio Scotland will be on site recording highlights for broadcast on American roots show Another Country and, of course, the famous Southern Fried soul food is the icing on the cake for this annual Americana feast served up with a warm slice of Scottish hospitality.

Check out the latest as it emerges on www.southernfriedfestival.co.uk; make sure you are a Southern Fried Facebook and Twitter buddy for all the back stage chat, and tune into the Southern Fried You Tube channel for a taster of what’s in store.

For tickets and info contact Horsecross Arts box office on 01738 621031 visit www.southernfriedfestival.co.uk

Source: Horsecross

opera magazine

sound, Scotland’s ambitious festival of new music, has been shortlisted for a prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) Music Award it was announced today, Thursday 11 April 2013. The RPS Music Awards, presented in association with BBC Radio 3, are the highest recognition for live classical music-making in the UK. One of only three events shortlisted for the Concert Series and Festivals Award, sound’s nomination underscores the impact that the north east Scotland-based festival has made in the 8 years since it was founded by Professor Pete Stollery of Aberdeen University and Mark Hope of Woodend Barn, Banchory. The RPS Music Award nomination is for the 2012 sound Festival, a highlight of which was the Out of the Box opera weekend featuring new commissions from Pippa Murphy and Ben Harrison; John and Zinnie Harris; Gareth Williams and Johnny McKnight; Stephen Deazley and Matthew Sharp, among others, which were staged in unusual places and spaces such as a stables, a lighthouse, a flat, a pub and even on a bus.

“We are thrilled to have been short-listed for the RPS’ Concert Series and Festivals Award,” says festival director Fiona Robertson. “sound is fairly young new music festival and works in a slightly unusual fashion – with a network of local partners involved in programming events in the festival, and a very small staff team. We’re also geographically pretty far north, so it is terrifically exciting to be shortlisted for such a prestigious UK award.”

“The nomination recognises the hard work and commitment of many people (including the support of so many musicians and composers) which enabled us to create such a diverse festival, and also recognises the important place of new music in Scotland’s contemporary cultural landscape. Obviously none of this would have been possible without receiving regular public and private funding over the years from organisations such as Creative Scotland, the PRS for Music Foundation, Aberdeen City and Shire, the University of Aberdeen and a number of trusts and foundations (RVW Trust, Hinrichsen Foundation, Astor of Hever Trust, Aberdeen Endowments Trust, David and June Gordon Memorial Trust, D’Oyly Carte Charitable Trust, Hugh Fraser Foundation, Leche Trust…).”

The 2012 sound Festival ran from 19 October – 18 November with other highlights including a series of concerts featuring the talented young musicians of NYOS Futures who performed the World Premiere of three sound commissions: Paul Mealor’s Crucifixus with NYCOS and Jeremy Huw Williams, Stephen Montague’s Phrygian Ferment with harpsichordist Elisabeth Chojnacka and Oliver Searle’s Close to Shore for contrabass flute with flautist Richard Craig. This were some of 17 World Premieres at the festival. Others included a sound commission from Robert Saxton, Little Suite for Organ; Geoff Palmer’s A Caedmon Symphony and David Matthew’s Romanza, performed by the acclaimed violinist, Madeleine Mitchell. Other performers included Red Note Ensemble, Rolf Hind, Tommy Smith’s Karma; Ruth Wall – the girl with 3 harps; Simon Thacker’s Svara Kanti and Claudia Molitor. The 2013 sound Festival will be staged in venues across North East Scotland in October and November.

sound is the North East of Scotland’s festival of new music. It is an initiative of Woodend Barn and the University of Aberdeen which operates as a network of local and some national organisations. Following a pilot event, “Upbeat” in 2004, the first festival was launched in November 2005. sound is now an annual event, which aims to make new music more accessible to audiences of all ages and backgrounds by presenting an eclectic but very broad range of contemporary music – classical, traditional, popular, jazz, experimental – through a wide array of events including concerts, talks, electroacoustic installations, and workshops. As well as programming its own events, sound operates as an umbrella for a range of concerts, workshops, masterclasses and performances programmed by other organisations in the North East. Dame Evelyn Glennie, James MacMillan and Rohan de Saram are current Patrons of the Festival.

The Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards are the highest recognition for live classical music-making in the United Kingdom. These independent awards were set up in 1989 to celebrate the outstanding musical achievements of both young and established, British and International, musicians. In 2003, BBC Radio 3 became our media partners, devoting a full- length programme to the RPS Music Awards. The RPS Music Awards are governed by the Society’s guiding principles of Excellence, Creativity and Understanding. Nominations are invited annually from leading members of the profession and organisations throughout the country. Each Award is decided by an eminent, independent jury.

The 13 categories of award honour performers and composers as well as inspirational programmers, communicators, education and outreach work. There is no restriction on the nationality of recipients, but the awards are for achievements within the United Kingdom. The Concert Series and Festivals Award, for which sound has been shortlisted, was donated by Lalita Carlton- Jones.

For further information on sound visit www.sound-scotland.co.uk

The Winners of the RPS Music Awards will be announced on 14 May 2013. For further information about the RPS Music Awards, including full lists of previous winners, visit
www.rpsmusicawards.com

The festival will showcase scottish talent and will feature guest appearances by musical artists from around the world. We anticipate an attendance of 1000 visitors over the weekend.  Interactive workshops will enhance the entertainment by providing:

musical workshops

expert master classes

engaging performances

a composition competition

This festival is the final highlight of an ongoing social project which seeks to bring music to remote Scottish communities and whose goal is to combat social issues stemming from remoteness and boredom in rural areas today.

My team and I work with young people (16-24) from different communities in the Scottish Highlands to empower them through musical expression.

The use of video-conferencing technology throughout the project and festival will integrate local communities into a wider global musical network.

Find out how you can support us below!

message from the amaSing founder – Emily Scott

I am Emily, a Scot, music graduate, singer & composer.

I founded amaSing because I believe that everyone deserves to be engaged in music, regardless of location.

This festival will be the first of its kind! my goal is to establish a transferrable model for it to be organised regularly for a long-term positive impact on rural communities.

This project is my dream and I am devoting all my time, day and night, to make it happen.

Your support is invaluable to me:

connect me to artists who would be interested in performing at the festival.

promote the festival through your network.

www.amasing.co.uk  facebook.com/amasing  twitter.com/amasinguk

donate online –  www.amasing.co.uk/get-involved.html

Another long-term project is the development of a multi-sensory music software to encourage song memorisation.

Please get in touch if you have further questions (emily@amasing.co.uk )

Source: amaSing

ALAN Greig Theatre and Grant Smeaton‘s Do You Nomi? –  a melange of theatre and dance – kicked off Ullapool Dance Festival 2013. And two lithe male bodies, sinuously and sensuously traversed a stark white set, immediately commanded the attention of an expectant audience.

ICONIC, avant garde pop artist Klaus Nomi died before his unique style reached the masses. But he did come to the attention of David Bowie and Iggy Pop, for whom he is said to have been an inspiration. This show tells the story of Nomi’s short lived career and his premature demise from AIDS in 1983.

Drew Taylor in Do You Nomi? (photo Paul Watt)

It is a powerful reminder that the theatre is a forum for stories and that these stories have many directions of travel. Beyond the narrative unfolding on stage is a collective response on the part of the onlookers. Last night’s Highland audience was taken to the very brink of what might be considered socially acceptable. We were given insight into the gay scene of 1980s New York, where outrageous personal reinvention and casual sex were the norm.

However, an all-pervading quality of truth and innocence underpinned all four performances, so any confrontation or collision of values was averted. Instead, a tangible current of expression and resonance flowed between stage and auditorium and the possibility for a quantum shift in attitudes was born.

At one point, two characters each declare the other to be a freak. To which the reply is, “yes, a freak among freaks.” However, skilled direction on the part of award winning director Grant Smeaton, took the story way beyond the realms of cliché to expose a powerfully pulsating humanity in the hearts of its protagonists.

The two actors, Laurie Brown and Drew Taylor, danced admirably. And dancers Darren Anderson and Jack Webb, appeared, in turn, to take to acting with ease. There were seamless shifts between speech and movement and some slick changes of tempo, facilitated by a rollicking soundtrack and deft lighting. These ensured that the spell cast in the opening scene held to the last.

During the re-enaction of a TV interview, things could so easily have become static, but supremely talented choreographer Alan Greig was not going to let that happen. As the dialogue progressed, the performers gracefully moved on and around their chairs adding a visual dimension to the conversation.

To create a piece of theatre that is groundbreaking on so many levels is admirable enough. However, to do it in such a way that the audience is unaware of the shifts of awareness and acceptance that it is undergoing, is truly astounding. Do You Nomi? is a creative collaboration, underpinned by immense skill and shot through with vitality and passion. Now this tour has ended, we should lobby for its return.

© Jenny McBain, 2013

Links

• Alan Greig Dance Theatre
• Grant Smeaton
• Ullapool Dance Festival

SORREN Maclean spent much of his childhood in and around An Tobar, Tobermory’s renowned arts centre where his father Gordon is Artistic Director.

LISTENING to a comprehensively wide range of musicians, the younger Maclean has forged his own musical path, informed by traditional Scots music but also incorporating dollops of Americana, jazz and pop. He is also a founder member of indie-pop outfit Kitty The Lion.

Sorren MacLean

That he’s comfortable with a wide-ranging musical palette is evident from the first chord, where he sings conversationally, accompanied by his own guitar, Luciano Rossi’s piano and later Danny Grant’s restrained percussion. It’s country-ish and jazz-y all at the same time, and very beguiling. Other songs also show an alt-country influence, like the fine ‘Way Back Home’, which fits into the territory of infectiously catchy songs also occupied by the Delgadoes and Biffy Clyro, with nicely shaped lyrics “Glimmering, shimmering in the Northern Lights”.

Fiddle players Hannah Fisher and Seonaid Aitken and cellist Su-a Lee (well known to fans of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Mr McFall’s Chamber) are thanked for their help arranging the strings, which have some interesting dissonances and unpredictability. Lee switches to the musical saw, Aitken to the piano and Rossi picks up lead guitar for the next song, the impressive ‘Rows and Rows of Boxes’.

Written over Christmas and Hogmanay on Mull, his collection of songs for this Celtic Connections commission is entitled Winter Stay Autumn. The title track is particularly lovely, with smooth warm vocal harmonies and lots of space, restrained percussion offsetting passionate cello and building to an ecstatic resolution before jumping sideways into a fast driving rock-style finish. Maclean demonstrates in his addition to the new:voices strand that he completely understands the craft of song-writing.

Last year’s winner of the BBC’s Young Traditional Musician of the Year competition, Oban’s Rona Wilkie, debuted her new:voices commission Ceangailte (Connected) the previous week. Starting with a setting of the Carmina Gaedelica sung by clarsach player Rachel Newton accompanied by Patsy Reid (fiddle), Marit Fält (octave mandolin), Hayden Powell (trumpet), Colin Nicolson (accordion) and Allan MacDonald Jr (pipes/percussion/vocals) and Wilkie herself, it was a delightful musical exploration of the history of the Highlands.

Competitors in this year’s Young Trad final included very impressive showings by Inverness fiddler Graham Mackenzie and Argyll pianist Andrew Dunlop, while Lewis singer/songwriter Miss Irenie Rose’ debuted at Hazy Recollections; for those who haven’t had the pleasure of hearing her, imagine the fusion of Nick Drake, Amy Winehouse and Joni Mitchell with flashes of gospelsinger fervour.

Meanwhile entrants on the Danny Kyle stage included Charlie Grey, currently a student at Plockton and tipped as one to watch by a noted radio producer…. On the strength of these and many other performances, including the traditional music students at the Royal Conservatoire in their annual show, shared this year with students from Stockholm, the future of traditional music is looking very bright indeed.

© Jennie Macfie, 2013

Links

• Celtic Connections
• Sorren Maclean on Facebook

The Cardiff-born Welsh speaker will return to his home country to speak about his distinguished media career at the festival, which celebrates the unique languages and cultures of the Celtic nations and regions on screen and in broadcasting. Harri’s career began at a Welsh-language radio station before he moved to national Welsh-language channel S4C, where he worked on the news programme Newyddion as well as a number of historical documentaries.

He spent 18 years with the BBC, where his assignments included covering the collapse of communism in East Germany and reporting from inside Iraq during the first Gulf War, as well as stints as their chief political correspondent, North America business correspondent and Rome correspondent. He was appointed Communications Director for the Mayor of London Boris Johnson’s administration in 2008, and left his post after Mr Johnson’s successful re-election in May last year to join News International as Director of Communications. In what is sure to be a highlight of the festival, Harri will appear in conversation with Peter Florence – the Director and co-founder of the Hay Festivals – the renowned celebration of arts and literature which is rooted in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, and which has expanded across the globe.

Further details on the Celtic Media Festival 2013 will be unveiled shortly, with the shortlist for the prestigious Bronze Torc Awards for Excellence set to be revealed later this month. The shortlist will celebrate the very best of film, television, radio and digital media promoting the unique languages and cultures of the Celtic nations and regions.

Domhnall Caimbeul, Chairman of the Celtic Media Festival, said: “We’re thrilled to announce Guto Harri as our first speaker for the Celtic Media Festival 2013. He is one of the most highly respected figures in the industry and has a long-standing association with Celtic media through his background in Welsh-language broadcasting, and we’re delighted to be bringing him to Swansea for the festival. This year’s festival is already shaping up to be a fantastic event, and we’ll be announcing further details of the programme, as well as the hotly anticipated shortlist for the prestigious Bronze Torc Award for Excellence over the coming months.”

Guto Harri said: “News is a basic human necessity… Like food, drink, clothing and shelter. But it’s changing fast and those in media and those dealing with it have a major challenge. Smaller communities and those communicating through less dominant languages have a greater challenge, but there are opportunities too and I look forward to being in Dylan Thomas’s town exploring how a good story properly told can resonate far afield.”

For more details on the history of the festival, award categories and delegate registration, please visit: www.celticmediafestival.co.uk

Source: Celtic Media Festival

Over 18 days in January and February, 2100 artists from around the globe descended on Glasgow. Highlights of the 2013 festival included a poignant tribute to Dundee singer-songwriter Michael Marra. Other memorable performances included The Mavericks, Transatlantic Sessions with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Old Crow Medicine Show, Salif Keita, Kate Rusby, Carlos Núñez & the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Amy Helm, Dougie MacLean, Roddy Hart and the Lonesome Fire, Fiddlers Bid, Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, Aimee Mann and Bellowhead.

Music fans attended a vast numbers of concerts, ceilidhs, talks, free events, late night festival club and workshops, which took place in 20 venues across Glasgow over 18 days in January.

The festival is renowned for its ambitious programme of one-off shows, world exclusive performances and unique collaborative events. The 2013 line-up explored the connections between Celtic music and cultures across the globe, bringing musicians from all over the world to Glasgow, with acts from as far afield as India, Brazil, Ethiopia, Mexico, Mongolia, Mali, Angola and Senegal as well as across Europe, the USA and Canada.

Celtic Connections continues to have an international appeal and enhance Glasgow’s reputation as a major tourist destination. Fans visited from all corners of the globe to experience the best in traditional, folk, roots, world and indie music, from Mali to the USA and Canada, as well as across Europe and around the UK.

There were almost 50 sold-out shows including the 20th Celebration Opening Concert, Washington Irving, Scots in the Spanish Civil War, The Mavericks, Duncan Chisholm in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, An Evening with Cowboy Junkies, Glasgow St Patrick’s Day, Donnie Munro & Joy Dunlop, JD McPherson, Sarah Jarosz and Leon Hunt, The Two Man Gentleman Band, The Dardenelles, Preston Reed and the hugely popular Transatlantic Sessions, which is now on tour, bringing a dazzling international cast of Celtic and Americana musicians to concert halls across the UK following its sell-out success in Glasgow over two nights.

The final weekend of Celtic Connections also featured a major showcase of Scottish music, with over 180 international music industry delegates in town to sample the cream of Scottish musical talent performing as part of Showcase Scotland at Celtic Connections. The largest gathering of the international music community in Scotland, Showcase Scotland provides acts with the opportunity to perform in front of promoters, record labels and agents from 27 different countries. The exposure that artists gain can lead to record deals and overseas touring contracts, promoting Scottish music and artists to new audiences around the world.

Every year at Celtic Connections the best of new musical talent perform at the Danny Kyle Open Stage. A diverse panel of judges – from industry stalwarts to members of the general public – then picked six winners from the sixty acts which took part. The Danny Kyle Open Stage 2013 winners – all of whom will perform a support slot at next year’s festival – Gria, Graham Lowand Jack Kirkpatrick, Taylor & Leigh, Genesse, Elliot Morris and Mulk.

Donald Shaw, Celtic Connections Artistic Director, said:

“The 20th Celtic Connections draws to a close today and we are delighted that once again the talented musicians who have taken part and the enthusiastic festival audiences have made this year another brilliant success. We’ve witnessed some unique one-off collaborations and fantastic performances over the past eighteen days.

“We now turn towards next year when the 21st Celtic Connections will kick start what is going to be a very exciting year for sport and culture in Scotland.”

Councillor Archie Graham, Chair of Glasgow Life, said:

“Celtic Connections continues to go from strength to strength and this, its 20th year, has been no exception. This year’s festival has brought some of the finest musicians to Glasgow for some very special performances. The city has come alive with festival goers from all over the world to enjoy some of the very best homegrown and international talent. Celtic Connections provides a significant economic boost for the city and brings some much needed cheer to cold winter nights.

“We’re already looking forward to the festival coming of age in 2014 as we celebrate 21 glorious years of the world’s best folk and world music showcase.”

 Source: Celtic Connections

LOTS OF AMAZING CONCERTS STILL TO GO!

Tomorrow night at the O2 ABC Aimee Mann and Amelia Curran will be performing. This year Aimee Mann celebrates 20 years since her first solo release Whatever. Last year her eighth studio album Charmer once again foregrounded all the qualities that underpin her music’s enduring potency: an unflinching fascination with human dysfunction, contradiction and frailty, together with trenchant lyrical economy and sophisticated pop savvy, the last fuelling Charmer’s delicious tension between gimlet – eyed insight and glossy 1980s-style polish.

Newfoundland singer-songwriter Amelia Curran has followed up her Juno Award-winning Hunter, Hunter album in stunning style with 2012’s intimately personal yet probingly philosophical Spectators.

Also performing tomorrow night is Anda Union with Frigg in the Old Fruitmarket. A major hit at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Anda Union are a young Mongolian band whose songs and tunes reflect the full vastness of their remote homeland, drawing on influences derived “from all the tribes that Genghis Khan unified”. They showcase an astounding array of throat singing techniques, accompanied by traditional instrumentation, combine with sturdy melodies.

Supporting tonight is Frigg. Widely tipped as successors to such seminal Nordic bands as JPP and Väsen, Finnish/Norwegian seven-piece Frigg unite deep traditional roots with a gloriously freewheeling array of Americana, Celtic and Balkan influences. Featuring multiple fiddles, mandolin, cittern, Estonian bagpipes, dobro, guitar and double bass, their dazzling virtuosity and hugely exhilarating live shows place them firmly at the forefront of contemporary international folk.

On Thursday night in the O2 ABC Scottish folk-rockers Skerryvore will be performing. They have come a long way from their island ceilidh-band beginnings on tiny Tiree, especially once their award-winning self-titled third album released in 2010 catapulted them onto the international circuit. Having since wowed crowds from Chicago to Shanghai, T in the Park to Central Park, they followed up with last summer’s buoyantly polished World of Chances.

Supporting Skerryvore is Goitse who were forged in the white-hot creative crucible of Limerick University’s Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, young Irish trad (-ish) quintet Goitse have certainly graduated with honours, recently winning feverish critical plaudits fro their Dónal Lunny-produced second album Transformed.

On Thursday 31st January The Songs of Robert Tannahill will be celebrated in the Mitchell Theatre. As with his definitive 12-volume series of Burns recording, Dr Fred Freeman aims as musical director of The Complete Songs of Robert Tannahill to present the Paisley weaver/poet/songwriter’s work firmly in the context of Scotland’s folk scene today, highlighting its enduring qualities – ranked by many on a par with Burns – via fresh arrangements and a top-quality musical cast. This concert launches Volume 3 in the series – of a prospective five – with singers including Rod Paterson, Nick Keir, Fiona Hunter, Brian Ò hEadhra and Lucy Pringle, plus house-band accompaniment from Aaron Jones, Angus Lyon, Marc Duff, Stewart Hardy, Frank McLaughlin and Chris Agnew.

Sam Carter and The Bonny Men will be in the Tron on Thursday 31st January. Since winning the Horizon prize for best newcomer at 2010’s Radio 2 Folk Awards, Midlands born singer-songwriter and guitarist Sam Carter has been in demand everywhere from Richard Thompson’s Meltdown to the Middle East – the latter as part of British/Arabic collaboration Shifting Sands, performed at Celtic Connections in 2011. On his second album, 2012’s The No Testament, Carter adapts US devotional traditions – gospel, spirituals, shape-note singing – into his own movingly prayerful though secular hymns.

The formidable young traditional Irish eight-piece, The Bonny Men have been turning heads aplenty since they formed in early 2011, earning widespread comparisons to the Bothy Band’s early heyday.

In the Old Fruitmarket on Thursday the Hothouse Flowers will be performing. Since their chart-topping success in the late 1980s, and while continuing to make albums as the muse moves them, Ireland’s Hothouse Flowers have matured above all else into an awesomely great live band. Having started out as buskers in Dublin, when schoolmates Liam Ó Maonlaí and Fiachna Ó Braonáin formed street-theatre duo The Incomparable Benzini Brothers – becoming a band with the addition of bassist Peter O’Toole, who’s recently rejoined the line-up – they’ve never lost that freewheeling, in-the-moment dynamic, just as their music roams freely and instinctually across folk, soul, rock, blues and gospel territory. Every gig responds to and builds on its particular occasion and audience, such that no two shows are the same – except in the universal euphoria they engender, as captured on the latest Hothouse Flowers release, the 2010 live recording Goodnight Sun.

One of the most highly acclaimed folk/bluegrass bands in the UK today, Southern Tenant Folk Union will be supporting Hothouse Flowers. They have just released their fifth album (Hello Cold Goodbye Sun) and since starting out in 2006 have toured their exciting live show all over the UK, Ireland, Netherlands & Germany. A seven piece all acoustic band with banjo, mandolin, fiddle & harmony vocals they perform an eclectic mix of high energy atmospheric folk and have received airplay from Bob Harris & Steve Lamacq on BBC Radio 2 and made live appearances on RTE TV (The View) & Radio 4’s Loose Ends.

On Friday 1st February “the golden voice of Africa” Salif Keita will be performing in the Old Fruitmarket. Salif Keita emerged in the 1980s as one of world music’s first international stars, following an early apprenticeship with now-legendary Malian outfits Super Rail Band de Bamako and Les Ambassadeurs. Cross-fertilising his native griot traditions and other West African sounds with pop, jazz, Latin and Islamic influences, Keita’s music has evolved from largely electric, synth-based fusions to the soulfully rootsy, organic approach of his latest acclaimed album, 2010’s La Difference.

Bwani Junction will be supporting Salif. Produced by Paul Savage (Franz Ferdinand, Brakes, Mogwai, Teenage Fanclub), Edinburgh-born band Bwani Junction headlined the BBC Introducing stage at T in the Park last year, recorded a session for Huw Stephens and supported The Vaccines and Little Comets. They have performed at a raft of festivals, with sets lined up at Latitude, The Great Escape, Liverpool Sound City and T in the Park, among others.

On Saturday 2nd February Roddy Hart & The Lonesome Fire and Three Blind Wolves will be performing in the O2 ABC. 2013 is shaping up to be a very big year for Glasgow singer-songwriter Roddy Hart, with his new full-band album Roddy Hart & The Lonesome Fire, recorded with fabled producer Danton Supple (Coldplay, Morssey), due in spring. Tonight launches an appetite-whetting EP ahead of the main release, as Hart’s darkly compelling conjunction of classic Americana and Celtic soul truly comes into its own.

Attracting comparisons with the likes of Bon Iver and the Decemberists, Glasgow four-piece Three Blind Wolves’ forthcoming debut album, Sing Hallelujah for the Old Machine, is already winning high praise and extensive advance airplay, alongside their reputation as outstanding live performers.

Also on Saturday night in the Arches The Beatstalkers, one of the very few bands to have caused an actual riot such was the screaming fan frenzy they incited as Scotland’s first real pop phenomenon. Combining blues/soul rarities with original material (and the odd early David Bowie composition), they came tantalisingly close to full-scale stardom in the mid-1960s, leaving a handful of cult-classic songs and cherished memories that eventually led to their first Barrowland reunion in 2005 – this being only the second occasion that all original members have performed together again.

Appearing with The Beatstalkers will be special guest Hamish Stuart. Having been the lead guitarist and falsetto voice of Glasgow funk legends Average White Band, he has had his fair share of hits too. After they split he joined the bands of two Beatles (Paul and Ringo), played with Aretha Franklin and wrote for Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross. Expect some Average White Band songs, as well as Stuart’s solo material.

Also added to the bill at the Arches are DJs from Glasgow’s Friday Street Club, playing a broad range of Mod records, Zoot Money, Fraser Watson (The Poets) and The Beatroots.

NEW ARTIST ADDED TO LINE UP

Special guest King Creosote will be appearing alongside Fiddlers Bid in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 2nd February. The eclectic indie folk musician, plaintive troubadour and founder of the esteemed Fence Records will bring something extra special to this Saturday night concert.

Since their triumphant 20th anniversary concert at Celtic Connections 2011, individual members of Shetland champions Fiddlers’ Bid have been busy with numerous other projects, from Kevin Henderson’s Nordic Fiddlers’ Bloc to Chris Stout and Catriona McKay’s collaboration with composer Sally Beamish, Seavaigers.

Such wide-ranging experience only replenishes the band’s primary love-affair with their native islands’ music – from the very old to the very new – and their appetite for playing together. Following huge critical acclaim for 2009’s All Dressed in Yellow, a new Bid album is currently in the works.

Also performing is Scotland’s Emily Smith has also won increasing praise for her sensitive contemporary covers and eloquent original songwriting. She’ll be previewing material from her forthcoming fifth album, due out in 2013.

INFINITE SCOTLAND TAKES TO THE ROAD AT CELTIC CONNECTIONS

SCOTLAND’S DNA is to be put under a theatrical microscope as a stunning multi-media production takes to the road as part of the Year of Natural Scotland.

Infinite Scotland, which comes to Celtic Connections on Friday 1st February at the Tron Theatre, explores the country’s contrasting landscapes, coastlines and cities in a groundbreaking project featuring breathtaking images, music, film and words.

‘Scotland small? Our multiform, infinite Scotland small?’ was a famously incredulous question posed by poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and inspiration for the show, narrated onstage by actor Blythe Duff and writer and broadcaster Kenny Taylor.

Infinite Scotland blends scientific eyes and artistic creativity with astounding results. Grains of sand under an electron microscope, revelations about the language of plants, ancient sacred places, rocks, trees, mammals, birds – discovering the life and landscape around us and how we have interacted with it over millennia is profoundly compelling.

Scottish Natural Heritage and Creative Scotland funded the project as part of the Year of Natural Scotland, which celebrates the country’s natural and historic landscapes.

The website www.infinite-scotland.com will features material from the show and extra unique content.

Source: Celtic Connections

Julie Gibson from the University of the Highlands and Islands’ archaeology department will explore the issue through case studies from the Orkney Isles, where almost a third of all known sites are either being damaged by, or are under risk from, the sea. Ms Gibson, who is also Orkney’s community archaeologist, will conclude her talk by looking at opportunities to safeguard these sites to protect Scotland’s cultural heritage and contribute to our economy.

Speaking about the threat, Ms Gibson said: “Scotland has the longest coastline in Europe and, as a maritime nation, much of our heritage relates to the sea.

“Around Orkney, more than a thousand archaeological sites are threatened or are being actively damaged. The 5,000 year old Stone Age village of Skara Brae is dependent upon a sea wall that requires constant maintenance, the medieval site of Langskaill in Westray retreated five metres in one go a few years back and a Pictish site on Lamb Holm went from being a visible building to nothing but a line of rubble.

“Such erosion not only causes us to lose valuable information about our past, but may also damage Scotland’s future economy and the livelihoods of people in remote and rural areas. If these sites receive suitable investment, they have the potential to generate finds and media interest which will attract visitors from across the globe.”

Ms Gibson’s talk, “Rising tides: climate change and the loss of our coastal heritage,” will be accompanied by music from University of the Highlands and Islands BA applied music students. The lecture is one of a number of free Celtic Connections events organised by the University, an education partner with the festival. Students and staff will be involved in a variety of lectures and concerts, including a debate on the origin of Scotland’s indigenous languages chaired by comedian Susan Morrison.

“Rising tides: climate change and the loss of our coastal heritage” takes place from 12:30pm to 1:30pm on Thursday 31 January in Studio 1 of the Glasgow City Halls. The event is free, but ticketed. To book a place or find out more, visit www.celticconnections.com

Source: UHI

Projects to take place throughout Scotland during 2013. Announcement coincides with world premiere theatre production celebrating Scottish natural and artistic landscape at Eden Court Theatre, tonight.

Fourteen projects offering opportunities to engage with natural surroundings in innovative and exciting ways, are to receive a share of more than £500,000, as part of the Year of Natural Scotland 2013.

Supported by Creative Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage the funding was announced today, Monday 28 January, 2013, on the eve of the world premiere of Infinite Scotland at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness – a multi-media production celebrating Scotland’s fascinating natural diversity and artistic life and featuring Blythe Duff and Kenny Taylor.

Taking place right across the country from an urban wetland park in the west to a remote stretch of land north of Aberdeen and the environment around Dunbar in the east that inspired the great conservationist John Muir, the fourteen extraordinary projects will bring together community groups, individual artists and the wider community in projects including: NVA’s new public artwork Island Drift, set to transform the islands in the southern reaches of Loch Lomond using bespoke lighting technologies to create a compelling series of photographic works (a collaboration between NVA, Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park); writing and walking residencies at four of Scotland’s Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, Argyll, the Borders and Dumfries & Galloway (a collaboration between Walking With Poets, Scottish Poetry Library, Royal Botanic Garden and Cove Park); Dumfries and Galloway’s new International Environmental Arts Festival (a collaboration between Wide Open, Crichton Carbon Centre, Scottish Natural Heritage, Forestry Commission Scotland, Spring Fling and The Stove) and Dunbar’s North Light Arts’ Journeys: Walking a Line – a year-long site-specific project inspiring creative journeys and collaborations exploring the nature and potential of the environment through the act of walking, marking and recording; the seeding and sharing of ideas, exhibition, performance and participation. N.B. Please see below for full details and quotes of all funded projects.

Commenting on the writing and walking residencies, Robyn Marsack, Director of the Scottish Poetry Library, said: “The Year of Natural Scotland encourages reflection on some large questions: how do people shape what’s natural? How do we learn to really look at what nature offers? Is nature a comfort or a challenge? Our project enables poets to consider these and many other aspects of nature in relation to Scotland’s wonderful Royal Botanic Gardens, bringing people and poets together to walk and talk, observe and write in four locations across Scotland. ‘By leaves we live’ is written on the Library’s threshold, and we’re delighted to have been given the opportunity to animate that thought.”

The funding was announced today ahead of the world premiere performance of Infinite Scotland at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness. Infinite Scotland – joint funded by Creative Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage – explores the country’s contrasting landscapes, coastlines and cities in a project that features breath-taking images, music, film and words. Inspired by poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and narrated onstage by actor Blythe Duff and writer and broadcaster Kenny Taylor, the performance piece is set against a multi-media backdrop created by Arts in Motion’s John McGeoch and live music by The Island Tape’s David Allison.

“Scotland’s environment and culture are inextricably linked strands of the country’s DNA,” explained Infinite Scotland producer Bryan Beattie. “We wanted to explore that, using images, music and words. Putting Scotland’s DNA under the microscope in this way helps open our eyes to what’s around us.

“There are remarkable things around us every day that sometimes we just don’t notice – and some things that we have just not been aware of at all. Sometimes looking at what’s around us in a fresh way can reveal something completely new about it.”

Actor Blythe Duff said: “I love watching a piece that blends different elements, so I am delighted to be part of Infinite Scotland. As a performer, the project draws on so many different talents; it appeals on many levels, from the stunningly haunting singing voice of Maeve Mackinnon, to the beautifully crafted music, which underscores some powerful poetry, photography – and a few surprises.”

Commenting on today’s announcement, Iain Munro, Director of Creative Development at Creative Scotland, said: “Scotland is renowned for its breath-taking scenery, unique natural heritage, and world class arts. The Year of Natural Scotland programme is an opportunity for the creative and environmental sectors to inspire each other and develop new partnerships.

“The quality and number of applications received was extremely high and it is with a real sense of anticipation that we look forward to seeing these inspiring projects come to fruition across the country throughout the year.”

Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs, said: “I’m delighted that throughout The Year of Natural Scotland 2013 these projects will be showcasing the creativity and diversity which Scotland’s world-renowned environment inspires.

“This funding means people in Scotland and our visitors will be given the opportunity to engage with their natural surroundings in innovative and exciting ways and to discover or rediscover the natural brilliance that exists throughout our country.”

Ian Jardine, Chief Executive with Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), said: “We have enjoyed working with Creative Scotland supporting local people to develop these creative and practical projects. The Year of Natural Scotland 2013 aims to inspire Scotland’s people to experience our stunning environment. It is particularly pleasing to see a focus on John Muir, who inspired so many people to explore and enjoy natural landscapes.”

Supported projects across the country include:

Scotland wide

1. Sense Scotland who work with children and adults with complex communication support needs and multi-sensory impairments, will take three groups into remote areas near Aberdeen, Dundee and Glasgow where they will work with artists to create sensory artworks based on their experiences of the landscape, that map out the area. (Award: £26,800)

Isobel MacRae, Arts Development Officer at Sense Scotland, said: “This is a fantastic opportunity for some of the people we support to explore a remote environment and collaborate with an artist to express their experiences.”

2. Walking With Poets is a Scottish Poetry Library, Royal Botanic Garden and Cove Park residency project in which four poets will take up month-long writing and walking residency at all four of Scotland’s Botanic Gardens in Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Benmore in Argyll, Dawyck in the Borders, Logan in Dumfries & Galloway and Cove Park. (Award: £24,000)

Robyn Marsack, Director of the Scottish Poetry Library, said: “The Year of Natural Scotland encourages reflection on some large questions: how do people shape what’s natural? How do we learn to really look at what nature offers? Is nature a comfort or a challenge? Our project allows poets to consider these and many other aspects of nature in relation to Scotland’s wonderful Royal Botanic Gardens, bringing people and poets together to walk and talk, observe and write in four locations across Scotland. ‘By leaves we live’ is written on the Library’s threshold, and we’re delighted to have been given the opportunity to animate that thought.”

Glasgow & West

3. NVA are working with the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park to launch Island Drift, a public art work that will transform the islands in the southern reaches of Loch Lomond using bespoke lighting technologies to create a compelling series of photographic works. (Award: £46,900)

Angus Farquhar, Creative Director NVA, said: “The sixteen islands in the southern waters of Loch Lomond have long held a fascination for many people, those both living in and passing through the area. Island Drift affords us the opportunity to communicate that relationship to the wider world.”

4. The Sound Out@Seven Lochs project will work with residents around the proposed Seven Lochs Wetland Park, a planned new wetland park spanning the Glasgow City and North Lanarkshire boundary between Easterhouse and Coatbridge, to create and present new music pieces and soundscapes inspired by the heritage and natural heritage of the area. This project is led by Clyde Valley Green Network Partnership. (Award: £23,000)

Lucy Tozer, Seven Lochs Wetland Park Community Engagement Officer, said: “The Seven Lochs Wetland Park will be Scotland’s largest urban nature park. We want local people and visitors to experience and enjoy the park in a range of different ways – so we’re really excited about the opportunity to use Year of Natural Scotland funding to bring together music and nature to celebrate the park in what we hope will be a unique and inspiring project.”

Dumfries and Galloway

5. Wide Open in partnership with Crichton Carbon Centre, Scottish Natural Heritage and Forestry Commission Scotland will be working with Spring Fling and The Stove to present an International Environmental Arts Festival featuring commissions, talks, debates, workshops and events based on the themes of land and energy and centred around two international commissions in the east and west of the local area. (Award: £25,000)

Dr Jan Hogarth, Creative Director (Environment), Wide Open, said: “We are absolutely delighted with the news that Creative Scotland’s Year of Natural Scotland are going to support our environmental Art Festival which we hope will celebrate the regions creative and environmental strengths while also helping to celebrate the region’s aspirations to become an international home for artist practice in landscape”

Edinburgh & East

6. North Light Arts Journeys: Walking a Line is a year-long creative project centred on the traditional east coast fishing town of Dunbar. It will evolve over the seasons, inviting artists to work within the landscape and to develop the theme of journeys with inventiveness and sensitivity to the nature and potential of our landscape and to environmental sustainability, encouraging creative participation within this rich, beautiful and diverse landscape, still largely unknown as the environment that inspired the great conservationist John Muir. This project will be delivered by North Light Arts in partnership with Friends of John Muir, ELC Museums and Arts Service, ELC Landscape and Countryside, Ranger Service, Incredibly Edible Dunbar, Dunbar Cycle Group, Dunbar Harbour Trust, Dunbar Scifest. (Award: £49,900)

Susie Goodwin of North Light Arts, said: “North Light Arts Journeys: Walking a Line This site-specific project will inspire many creative journeys and collaborations which will explore the nature and potential of our environment: through the act of walking, marking and recording; through the seeding, and sharing of ideas, exhibition, performance, and participation in the footsteps of John Muir in this, the Year of Natural Scotland.”

Fife

7. Smallpetitklein Dance Company in partnership with Tentsmuir National Nature Reserve and Forestry Commission Scotland will deliver an outdoor event with professional and non-professional dancers exploring the history, fauna and flora and a scavenger hunt around Tentsmuir Nature Reserve, culminating in a spectacle performance in a series of Super Eco Dome tents. (Award: £42,000)

Emma Jane Beatt, executive producer Smallpetitklein Dance Company, said, “Smallpetitklein are delighted to receive this award which will allow the company to build on our already expansive engagement programme. TENT:acular will provide an inspirational celebration for families and communities this summer in the north east of Scotland.”

Borders

8. Tabula Rasa in partnership with The Tweed Forum and Southern Uplands Partnership will deliver a project that curates the spaces and activities around Scotland’s iconic River Tweed. Riverside meetings of artists, environmentalists and people working the river will bring focus to hidden elements inspiring a new body of artistic work in the region. (Award: £37,100)

Claire Pencak of Tabula Rasa, said: “Tabula Rasa is delighted to be awarded this Year of Natural Scotland funding and we are looking forward to working with our environmental partners The Tweed Forum and The Southern Uplands Partnership on a fascinating project that acknowledges the iconic status of the River Tweed.”

North East

9. Artist, composer and television director Chris Dooks, in a project entitled Tiny Geographies, will explore areas of North East, telling their stories through different art forms. Scotland’s leading contemporary fiddle players Paul Anderson and Aidan O’Rourke will compose new pieces in response to natural environments around Aberdeenshire. Working with the community on both elements the project will result in a week-long festival at Woodend Barn and other venues across Deeside. This project will be delivered by Woodend Arts Ltd in partnership with Cairngorm National Park, Mar Lodge, Glen Tanar Charitable Trust (Ranger Service) and Scottish Natural Heritage. (Award: £33,700)

Nicola Henderson Director at Woodend Barn, said: “We are located in one of the world’s most unique, diverse and beautiful landscapes and we are delighted to receive support for a project that allows us to look closely at our local tiny geographies while making universal connections through the dark skies above. Chris Dooks, Aidan O’Rourke and Paul Anderson will work with our local community on interpreting these landscapes through a variety of different art forms.”

10. Natural Bennachie will see three artists collaborating with partners and the local community to explore the natural heritage of the most prominent landmark in the North East of Scotland. The project will culminate in an eco-friendly public celebration, site-specific artworks and art-science collaborations. (Award £40,000). This project will be delivered by Scottish Sculpture workshop in partnership with Forestry Commission Scotland, Aberdeenshire Council Ranger Service, The Bailies of Bennachie, University of Aberdeen and Gray’s School of Art, RGU. www.naturalbennachie.org

Emily Wyndham Gray, Curator of Facilities and Programmes at Scottish Sculpture Workshop, said: “We are absolutely thrilled that Natural Bennachie has been awarded this grant. The project offers a completely unique opportunity to bring together multi-media artists to work alongside the local community, scientists, academics, environmental and conservation professionals, navigating the histories embedded in our landscape and re-connecting with the natural environment. Embracing the ideologies of environmental pioneer John Muir, the project partners are looking forward to sharing in the celebration of Bennachie with the artists, local communities and visitors to the North East this year.”

11. My Place in the Natural World aims to empower young people from Aberdeen to develop new creative digital media to celebrate and share the outstanding beauty of four Country Parks in the North-East of Scotland. This project is led by the Reading Bus, Aberdeen City Council in partnership with Music Without Bars . (Award £42,000)

David Leng, Head of Schools and Education Establishments at Aberdeen City Council, said: “This is an exciting opportunity for Aberdeen City Council pupils to work with the Reading Bus team to explore and discover the intrinsic natural beauty of the North-East of Scotland. Utilising new digital technologies, translate their findings in innovative and creative ways”

Highlands & Islands

12. Highland Print Studio will work in partnership with Cape Farewell to deliver an exhibition of contemporary visual art called Sexy Peat, celebrating the ecology and heritage of the Lewis blanket bog and highlighting the significant role that peat plays in global climate regulation. The project will also celebrate the Gaelic heritage relating to the bog and the significance of the bog to the people who have lived with it. (Award: £45,200)

Alison McMenemy, Director, Highland Print Studio, said: “The Lewis peatland is a big player in climate regulation that has never received the press awarded to its sexy tropical peers. We’re delighted to get the opportunity to bring artists and scientists together to celebrate this remarkable and haunting landscape.”

13. Fair Isle Marine Environment and Tourism Initiative who seek to ensure the waters surrounding the isle are used sustainably will work with composers, Inge Thomson and Lise Sinclair, to create Da Fishing Hands, a project featuring music and song inspired by documentation about Fair Isle’s fishing grounds and their changing use since 1900. (Award:£16,000)

Composer Inge Thomson, said: “We are delighted to have been awarded support for our project “Da Fishing Hands”. The Sea represents life, in the very deepest sense, to islanders. As artists we seek to confirm this and raise awareness of the importance of nurturing our marine resources.”

While Islander Jimmy Stout, said:”Environmentally, the sea has always been part of Fair Isle; it is now linked more closely to our culture as well, as people become more aware of socio-economc problems. This funding is good news, as it will brighten our star for what we are trying to achieve.”

14. Sweeny’s Bothy / Bothan Shuibhne, proposed by The Bothy Project (Bobby Niven and Iain MacLeod) in collaboration with Alec Finlay, is an artist-designed retreat for artists, writers, and the public. A programmed series of events, walks, and residencies, reflecting on wild nature and contemporary culture, broadcast via an ambitious multimedia website. (Award:£46,500) http://thebothyproject.blogspot.co.uk/p/sweenys-bothy.html

Bobby Niven from the Bothy Project said, “The Bothy Project is excited by the prospect of working with artist Alec Finlay to realise a unique programme of events for the Year of Natural Scotland 2013 that will culminate in a new art residency bothy which will then become part of The Bothy Project network of small-scale art residency spaces in distinct and diverse locations around Scotland. Our objective is to create platforms for artists to journey and explore the peculiarities of Scotland’s history, mythology, landscape and people, developing a new model of art residency that focuses on accessibility.”

Source: Creative Scotland

THE elaborately corniced, portico’d and vaulted hall of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery soars high above row upon row of chairs.

SOLD out for months, tonight the Strathglass Suite is the hottest ticket in rainy Glasgow; extra rows of seating have been squeezed in wherever possible and people are crowding on the balconies above. It’s also being filmed for later transmission on BBC Alba.

Duncan Chisholm (photo John Smith)

No pressure, then, on Duncan Chisholm and his band – Matheu Watson (guitar), Martin O’Neill (bodhran), Jarlath Henderson (pipes and whistles), Ross Hamilton (bass) and the statutory member of the Henderson family, Allan (piano and fiddle).

Accompanying them are a string & brass ensemble conducted by Gary Walker and led by Greg Lawson, known to some from Blazin’ in Beauly but here in his capacity as a freelance classical violinist.

One wonders, idly, what Donald Riddell would have thought, sitting in his croft in Abriachan, of the success enjoyed by his pupils who, as well as Chisholm, include Bruce MacGregor, Iain MacFarlane and Adam Sutherland.

In case you hadn’t noticed (and if you hadn’t, don’t worry, you will), this is the Year of Natural Scotland whose logo flashed up on the screen behind the performers. The Strathglass Suite is Chisholm’s musical tribute to the place of his birth and the home of his ancestors, where the valley of the Glass river widens out between Glen Affric and Aigas. It is drawn from a trilogy of CD releases, recorded over six years, Farrar, Canaich and the most recent, Affric.

Written in the thrall of what the Welsh call ‘hiraeth’, the deep love of one’s homeland, the Strathglass Suite inhabits an area of music thronged with popular favourites like Sibelius’ ‘Finlandia’, Smetana’s ‘Ma Vlast’ and many of the works of Vaughan Williams; on this showing Chisholm’s work is worthy of inclusion in the canon.

The opening notes are played by Jarlath Henderson – is there any sound more wistfully haunting than the Uillean pipes? – before the ensemble join in with some meltingly lovely strings. The suite would be a fine enough piece played only by Chisholm’s selection of traditional musicians, but with the addition of the ensemble’s rich musical textures it becomes a thing of great and lasting beauty.

Scottish Opera’s Stephen Adams has been in charge of the arrangements, which successfully bridge the folk/classical gap, the strings often echoing the cadences of the pipes and not merely framing the folk sections but weaving all the strands together. You can see it’s going well from the grins on the faces of the musicians; even the classical musicians are allowing themselves to tap their feet and nod their heads when the music heads off into the folkosphere.

The audience quickly abandons the stultifying classical convention (only introduced in the Victorian era) of not applauding between sections – to the extent of giving a standing ovation half way through after a fast, furious section driven by the great, lolloping beat of O’Neill’s bodhran.

Yes, the man from Wolfstone can break your heart with a slow air but he also knows how to rock. The barriers between classical and folk have been trampled over and it’s all just music. Things quieten down enough for Allan Macdonald to declaim, in Gaelic, an extract from Neil Munro’s ‘To Exiles’ before the last section, followed by a rapturous repeat of the standing ovation and a final, reprised encore. Magnificent.

Pride of New York, led by Cherish the Ladies’ force of nature, Joanie Madden, had the unenviable position of support band but gradually managed to win the audience over, delivering a knockout blow with an irresistible 400-year old tune on the whistle from Madden. If only the stage had been a little higher, it’d have been possible to see as well as hear them. The sound, too, is against them; Madden’s introductions, like Chisholm’s after her, are almost incomprehensible in the echoing acoustics.

© Jennie Macfie, 2013

Links

Duncan Chisholm

Jennie Macfie

FIRST on stage in the vaulted hall at the Glasgow Art Club was folk singer Ian Smith, originally from Kilmarnock but now resident in Donegal.

One self-penned song lamented the decline of his home town’s once vibrant city centre with a sad litany of shops and cafes that are no more. It must be some time since Smith went home as, ironically, on the other side of Scotland at St Andrews, Kilmarnock had just won the major Creative Places Award for 2013 for its transformation of closed retail and industrial premises into ‘thriving arts venues and their year round series of festivals’.

Fiona J. Mackenzie

The biggest of these music festivals is the Kilmarnock Edition, named for the famous 1786 collection of Burns’ poems in the Scots dialect, and one which inspired the name of the second act, a kaleidoscopic assembly of musicians from all sorts of genres who as individual winners of the Burnsong International Songhouse of 2009 were brought under one roof for a week of intensive songwriting collaboration. They’ve continued to make music together ever since, though chances for rehearsal for this far-flung crew, each busy with their own individual careers as singer-songwriters, are few and far between.

As a result their performance isn’t what you might call polished, but amid the gloriously exhilarating con-fusion of musical styles on stage, it simply didn’t matter. Yvonne Lyon, Lisa Rigby and Fiona J Mackenzie’s voices melted together irresistibly in beautiful harmonies strengthened by the warmth of Alex Hodgson’s voice and guitar, Roberto Cassani’s bass and Stuart Clark’s percussion textures. Additional delights were provided by Sarah on fiddle and producer David Lyon on box.

From Latin-y jazz to Gaelic song, from doo-wop to dub beats, it was a rich feast of musical elan. Hodgson’s humourous introductions were only outdone by Cassani. As he said, “My songs sound serious in my head, but when I sing them, people laugh”,and his lament for the angst of empty nest syndrome proved his point; comedy gold.

Dingwall-based Fiona J Mackenzie is the driving force behind the band; amid the cheers and whistles, her soft sweet unaccompanied Gaelic song had the power to hush the audience in seconds. As a complete contrast her paean to the smartphone, or little black box “Bocsaig beag dhu” was foot-tappingly catchy and, as with ‘Pay It Forward’ (the title track of their first album) the audience clapped along without any encouragement. That’s a cast iron indicator of a good gig, and the Kilmarnock Edition is certainly that.

© Jennie Macfie, 2013

Links

• Celtic Connections
• Jennie Macfie

The Big Burns Night will be taking place in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall where new arrangements of Burns songs will be performed by some of Scotland’s finest folk performers. Hosting the party here, at one of three shows in Rabbie’s honour tonight, are the brilliant young traditional band Breabach, who’ll be joined by a stellar selection of fellow Scottish artists – plus the odd surprise international guest – performing new arrangements of Burns songs and melodies.

As well as Breabach’s own Ewan Robertson and Megan Henderson, featured singers include the great Dougie MacLean OBE and Kathleen MacInnes – the latter highlighting the Gaelic melodies to which Burns often set his words – while Blazin’ Fiddles contribute more of the Bard’s favourite tunes, as well as string accompaniment to the songs. Scotland’s own Liz Lochead will perform the Immortal Memory.

Uniting the concepts behind previous years’ Indian and Jamaican-themed festivities Burns and Beyond in the Old Fruitmarket will feature ex-Gladiator and rural reggae legend Clinton Fearon and his band from Jamaica will be headlining a global celebration of Burns alongside British-born sarod innovator Soumik Datta, with beatboxer and ‘vocal sculptor’ Jason Singh and jazz/folk singer Fiona Bevan.

Also on the bill are the superb Scottish/Indian quartet India Alba and top Scottish folksong combo Malinky – back together after a couple of years’ hiatus, with a new album due in 2013.

There is a chance to don your glad rags and toast Scotland’s bard in style, amid the strikingly sumptuous surroundings of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum on Friday night. A gourmet musical menu includes outstanding young Scottish traditional singer Siobhan Miller lending her exquisitely dulcet tones to a selection of Rabbie’s finest with Brian Miller. Other guests include Adam Holmes, vocalist with the band Rura, who’ll meanwhile be hotting up the party with their brilliantly fiery instrumentals; Sheena Wellington; Alistair Ogilvy and MC Bryan Beattie. Your ticket also includes a traditional supper of haggis, neeps and tatties, followed by clootie dumpling, with a glass of wine and of course a dram. Dancing is optional afterwards to work off the feast, before carriages at midnight.

Source: Celtic Connections

Scone Palace, Perthshire

Friday 26th July – Sunday 28th July 2013

Tickets on sale at 9am on Friday 25th January

For ticket info and prices, please visit: www.rewindfestival.com

Due to the runaway success of the second annual “Rewind Scotland – The 80s Festival” at Scone Palace, Perthshire in 2012, the weekend festival returns for the third year! As with last year’s unforgettable concert performances and audience participation, this year’s Rewind Scotland boasts another impressive line-up of the crème de la crème of 80s pop artists.

Rewind Scotland will take place from Friday 26th July until Sunday 28th July at Scone Palace, Perthshire, Scotland. Tickets go on sale to the general public Friday 25th January. Ticket prices and further details are available from the official website – www.rewindfestival.com.

Saturday 27th July will be headlined by Ali Campbell’s UB40 with support from Kim Wilde, Mike + The Mechanics, Starship, Rick Astley, Howard Jones, Soul II Soul, Heather Small, A Flock Of Seagulls, Red Hot Chilli Pipers, Captain Sensible, and Odyssey.

Sunday 28th July will be headlined by OMD, plus knockout performances from Level 42, Tony Hadley, Belinda Carlisle, Nik Kershaw, The Blow Monkeys, The Blockheads, Jason Donovan, Cutting Crew, The Flying Pickets, Sonia, and Earth Wind & Fire Experience featuring Al McKay.

Rewind Scotland Festival will once again take place at the historic setting of Scone Palace in Perthshire; home of The Earls of Mansfield and the crowning palace of the Kings of Scotland. The festival includes additional festivities ranging from Silent Discos to Live Karaoke bars along with various Camping and Glamping (Glamorous Camping) options.

Source: Rewind

The evening of quick fire wit and wisdom, chaired by comedian Susan Morrison, features four of Scotland’s leading language academics: Dr Donna Heddle, Director of the University of the Highlands and Islands’ Centre for Nordic Studies, Professor Rob Dunbar, Director of Soillse (the National Research Network for the Maintenance and Revitalisation of Gaelic Language and Culture), with guests Dr Christine Robinson, Director of Scottish Language Dictionaries and J Derrick McClure, Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen.

Dr Donna Heddle explained: “Scotland has a diverse indigenous cultural identity and language is very much the foundation of it. It is time for us to cherish the diverse linguistic heritage which underpins who and what we are, for in our past lie the seeds of our future, and without our tongue, we cannot speak for ourselves. I am very much looking forward to being in discussion with such eminent and lively colleagues who will have plenty to say on this fascinating topic!”

The ‘Origins of Our Tongue’ debate is one of a number of free Celtic Connections events organised by the University of the Highlands and Islands, an education partner with the festival. University students and staff will be involved in a variety of lectures and concerts. For more information go to our website.

Susan Morrison warned language enthusiasts not to miss out: “Be there or haud yer wheesht!”

‘The Origins of Our Tongue’ takes place from 7.00pm to 9.00pm on Wednesday 30th January in Glasgow City Halls. The event is free, but ticketed. To book a place or find out more, visit www.celticconnections.com

Source: UHI

AT Sabhal Mòr Ostaig’s birthday party the honour of playing the first notes was given to a native of that well-known Gaelic enclave, California: Dr Decker Forrest, director of the Gaelic Music course and winner of many a close-fought piping competition.

HE also plays one of the most sweetly tuned set of pipes you’ll ever have the pleasure of hearing. Earlier in the day some of his students had delivered a thoroughly professional second half in the Solas ur Tobar an Dualchais concert at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, full of delightful arrangements, solid musicianship and close-knit vocal harmonies but also notable for their calm assurance and stagecraft. They were a real credit to him and their other tutors.

Julie Fowlis

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig has been tutoring students full-time for some 30 years. By contrast, the first half of the RCS concert featured the first-ever students of the Applied Music B.A at the University of the Highlands and Islands, a degree course which builds on Sabhal Mor Ostaig’s experience of distance learning. Tutorials are usually in person but if no accessible tutor can be found, Skype allows tuition from as far away, this year, as New York.

There is extraordinary potential for cross-fertilisation among musicians studying variously opera, rock, jazz , traditional Scottish music and everything in between. To start the process the students had been set loose in the treasure house of Tobar an Dualchais to research a piece of music, learn it, work in groups to create a work based on it and then perform it – with the added challenge that the collaboration, apart from the final rehearsals the day before, would take place online.

As Julie Fowlis highlighted in her introduction, the recording of these treasured archive works in the 1930s was due to then-new technology, and now today’s technology is allowing today’s students to revisit their ancestors’ heritage. The wheel turns; this fusion of ancient and modern is the power that fuels many of the finest artists working in Scotland today. The students, tentatively at times, drew on that energy with a programme that consistently challenged expectations.

Unaccompanied Gaelic ensemble singing was augmented by whistling, as though some young blackbird had decided to join in. A charmingly indie-fied version of the ‘Eriskay Love Lilt’ showcased some neat fingerstyle guitar. Banjo duetted with bodhran and flute with accordion. Later, immaculate electric guitar had this reviewer idly wondering what would have happened if Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour had gone to Glasgow School of Art … The lack of live rehearsal time showed in occasional rough edges, but did not tarnish the overall glow.

At Sabhal Mòr Ostaig’s birthday party later that night, there were many more demonstrations of experimentation rooted strongly in the tradition. Allan Macdonald of Glenuig opened the second half with a bravura demonstration of what freeform piping, loosed from the bonds of strict military meter, can be. Tightly fingered notes and gracenotes cascaded off the stage and took the audience’s collective breath away.

Julie Fowlis is fast becoming the international face of Gaeldom, but is also a former graduate and postgraduate of Sabhal Mor Ostaig and her rendition of ‘Bothan Àirigh am Bràigh Raithneach’ showed why. Deceptively simple, the simplicity that stems from dedicated professionalism.

The evening was studded with songs from Margaret Stewart (whose pure, silvery voice outshone even the sparkle of her jewels), James Graham, Alasdair Codona, Mary Ann Kennedy, and Christine Primrose, backed by the House Band, itself not short of formidable names including Iain Macdonald of Glenuig, Alasdair White, and Angus Nicholson, plus members of the Henderson family (musical director Allan and his sister Ingrid) without whom no Highland musical festivity is complete. (There is probably a bye-law to this effect in the depths of Highland Council).

On the tune side, Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas are never less than impressive but their dynamic, vibrant performance in the City Halls dazzled. Dàimh stepped up to the mark with their laidback, virtuosity while Fergie MacDonald’s brief turn centre stage demonstrated why he has been a legend since before Sabhal Mòr Ostaig began.

Last but not at all least, Michael O’Súilleabháin, Professor at the University of Limerick, conducted the orchestra of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in some bravura jazz-infused works that highlighted the superb soprano sax-playing of Kenneth Edge, before everyone crowded onstage to uplift their voices in one final anthem.

© Jennie Macfie, 2013

Links

• Celtic Connections
• Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
• Jennie Macfie

Speaking about the talk, Margaret Mary Murray said: “I am delighted to be able to spend some time during the Celtic Connections festival as a guest of the University of the Highlands and Islands to share some thoughts on the role and impact that Gaelic broadcasting has in Scotland, the UK and indeed across the world. BBC ALBA has been successful in taking Gaelic programmes to a wider audience and, in doing so, raising awareness of the Gaelic language and culture. The channel, which is delivered in partnership with MG ALBA, has also worked with a network of partners to support those learning and using the language. This event will also offer a very welcome opportunity to meet members of our audience to hear their views on the services we provide on TV, radio and online and the developments they would like to see in the future. ”

Margaret Mary Murray has been involved with the BBC’s Gaelic provision for almost 15 years. Brought up on the Isle of Lewis, she went on to complete an honours degree in Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow. She joined BBC Scotland’s Gaelic department in 1988 and has since worked as a researcher, producer, editor and occasional presenter for numerous television and radio programmes, including current affairs show, Eòrpa. Margaret Mary held positions as BBC Scotland’s Gaelic department executive editor and head of Gaelic, before being appointed as head of BBC ALBA in 2008.

Margaret Mary’s talk, “The Gaelic Language in the media,” has been organised by the University of the Highlands and Islands, an education partner of Celtic Connections. University students and staff will be involved in a number of free talks and concerts over the two week festival, including a debate on the origin of Scotland’s indigenous languages chaired by comedian Susan Morrison.

“The Gaelic Language in the media” takes place from 7pm to 9pm on Wednesday 23 January at BBC Scotland, Pacific Quay, Glasgow. The talk will be delivered in Gaelic and a simultaneous English interpretation will be available on request. The event is free, but ticketed. To book a place or find out more, visit www.celticconnections.com

Source: UHI

On the steps of the Concert Hall this morning Vicente Amigo, Spanish flamenco guitarist, gave a memorable performance with the rest of his band. Vicente will be performing his new album Tierra in the Main Auditorium of Glasgow Royal Concert Hall tomorrow night with some Celtic Connections regulars including Michael McGoldrick, Ewan Vernal, Donald Shaw and John McCusker. Images of Vicente’s performance will be available from Ian Watson from 12.30pm today (07850660321)

The 20th Celtic Connections festival will have a retrospective feel looking back over the success of the last 20 years and the ethos and artists that helped shape it. The festival will begin tonight with the 20th Anniversary Opening Concert that will epitomise this with an array of artists taking part who have performed over the past number of years. As the festival has grown, many of the featured artists have grown up with it, or reached new audiences via its stages. Over the years they have joined the intricate, ever-expanding and increasingly globe-spanning network of musical relationships forged and renewed each January. This celebratory concert also reflects back on the Scottish and traditional-based sounds that have always been Celtic Connections’ primary inspiration. Performers include Sheena Wellington, Eddi Reader, Julie Fowlis, Capercaillie, the newly reformed Flook, Cara Dillon, Chris Stout, Dick Gaughan, Finlay MacDonald, the Scottish Power Pipe Band and a specially-convened festival string ensemble helmed by Greg Lawson.

Donald Shaw, Artistic Director of Celtic Connections, said: “This January Celtic Connections turns 20 and we’ve got a superb line-up of musicians to help us celebrate the occasion. Many artists performing over the next eighteen days have been involved in the festival for a number of years but there is also an array of fresh new talent being showcased.

“Every year we explore the connections between Celtic music and other musical genres, as well as with cultures across the globe. This year the programme is the most diverse yet. As always we’re delighted to be bringing some astounding world music acts to Glasgow such as Salif Keita and also three fantastic artists from Mali’s different musical cultures for the Sahara Soul Project.”

Councillor Archie Graham, Chair of Glasgow Life, said: “Celtic Connections has established itself as one of the leading lights in Scotland’s cultural calendar. It celebrates its 20th anniversary doing what it does best, bringing artists and audiences from all over the world to Glasgow to enjoy unique performances and collaborations that will live long in the memory.”

NEW ARTISTS HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED

There have been a number of brilliant new support acts announced for this year’s festival.

Don’t miss one of the most highly acclaimed folk/bluegrass bands in the UK today Southern Tenant Folk Union who will support Hothouse Flowers at the Old Fruitmarket on Thursday 31st January.

Adam Holmes’ haunting songcraft will undoubtedly prove to be a popular opening for The Dardenelles in the Art Club on Sunday 27th January.

Multi-instrumentalist Tim Edey will perform with his trio to support Solas “Shamrock City” at the Old Fruitmarket tomorrow night.

Danny Kyle Open Stage winners Wingin’ It are sure to deliver a fiery, energy filled performance when they support Preston Reed at the Art Club on Wednesday 30th January.

The Be Good Tanyas have announced that due to ill health Sam Parton will not be joining the band for their concert at Celtic Connections. Replacing Sam will be special guest musician Caroline Ballhorn who is a multidisciplinary artist and musician based in Vancouver BC. Caroline contributed vocal harmonies to Frazey Ford’s 2010 release “Obadiah”

Highly-acclaimed Friday Street DJs will be performing with The Beatstalkers at the Arches on Saturday 2nd February.

SELLING FAST SO DON’T MISS OUT

Billed as the indie Transatlantic Session, Roaming Roots Revue with Amy Helm, Beth Orton, Lau and Roddy Hart and the Lonesome Fire as house band is a concert not to be missed at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Sunday 20th January

Hip-hoppers Stanley Odd & The Electric String Orchestra will bring force and grandeur to panoramic soundscapes at the Old Fruitmarket on Wednesday 23rd January.

Burns and Beyond at the Old Fruitmarket will unite the concepts behind previous years’ Indian- and Jamaican-themed festivities, the line-up includes leading-edge stars from both musical territories including the amazing ex-Gladiator and rural reggae legend Clinton Fearon. Also performing is British-born sarod innovator Soumik Datta, with beatboxer and ‘vocal sculptor’ Jason Singh and jazz/folk singer Fiona Bevan. Also on the bill are the superb Scottish/Indian quartet India Alba and top Scottish folksong combo Malinky – back together after a couple of years’ hiatus, with a new album due in 2013.

Two inventive young African rappers Baloji and Lëk Sèn which each create their own richly multi-layered synthesis of native traditional and contemporary music with African-American and other diaspora styles in the O2 ABC on Saturday 26th January.

Folk legend Martha Wainwright will showcase her outstanding new album Come Home to Mama in the main auditorium on Tuesday 29th January.

A wonderful evening of blues will be guaranteed with the Heritage Blues Orchestra with Eric Bibb in the Main Auditorium of Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Thursday 31st January.

Shetland champions Fiddlers’ Bid return hungrier than ever after their 20th anniversary at Celtic Connections 2011. In the Main Auditorium on Saturday 2nd February support will come from the outstanding traditional singer and gifted accordionist Emily Smith.

At the Art Club on Wednesday 23rd January the diverse talents of six winners and finalists from the international Burnsong songwriting competitions will be united to present The Kilmarnock Edition – Alex Hodgson, Lisa Rigby, Roberto Cassani, Fiona J. Mackenzie, Yvonne Lyon and Stu Clark – released their excellent, all-original debut album Pay It Forward in 2012, blending Scots, Gaelic, pop, world and jazz influences.

A WORLD OF MUSIC AT THE FESTIVAL

For twenty years the festival has celebrated the influence of Celtic music on cultures around the globe, with acts from as far afield as Australia, Greenland, Mexico, Mali, Pakistan, Serbia, Palestine, Senegal, Cuba, Congo, India, Cameroon, Japan, Israel, Argentina, South Africa as well as across Europe, the USA and Canada all visiting Glasgow to take part in the festival. The world music strand is just as strong during the festival’s 20th birthday with fantastic acts coming from far and wide.

Known as “the golden voice of Africa” Salif Keita will be set to impress with his cross-fertilisation of his native griot traditions and other West African sounds with pop, jazz, Latin and Islamic influences. Keita’s music has evolved from largely electric, synth-based fusions to the soulfully rootsy, organic approach of his latest acclaimed album, 2010’s La Différence.

The Sahara Soul Project is a defiantly inspiring collaboration which will unite artists from three of Mali’s different musical cultures. With his band Ngoni Ba, Bassekou Kouyaté is a modern-day pioneer of the ngoni, the banjo’s forebear instrument, boldly exploring new creative realms from his Fula tribal roots in southern Mali. From the country’s opposite end, young Tuareg outfit Tamishek have been hailed as worthy successors to Tinariwen, delivering a hypnotic blend of desert blues, dub beats and psychedelic rock, while the griot-descended Sidi Touré, from the currently beleaguered ancient northern city of Gao, interweaves old and new songs in the Songhai folk tradition.

A hugely influential giant of African music, Ethiopian multi-instrumentalist and composer Mulatu Astatke will be gracing the Celtic Connections stage. Mulatu enjoyed his original heyday during the 1960s and 70s, in both New York and Addis Ababa, pioneering the fusion of American jazz, funk and Latin sounds with his native traditional scales and melodies. Supporting Mulatu is flautist Lucas Santtana who has been hailed as a one-man Brazilian music revolution, cross-matching classic and contemporary styles with live and sampled sounds including reggaetón, electronic, classical music, indie-rock and tecnobrega.

The magnificent, otherworldly soundscapes of dissonant diaphonic harmonies of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares helped kick-start the whole world music movement 25 years ago and their performance at this year’s Celtic Connections will prove that they remain just as thrilling entertainers today.

Source: Celtic Connections

Throughout Celtic Connections 2013 the Gaelic tradition will be celebrated with some of the world’s finest Gaels taking centre stage at Glasgow’s annual folk, roots and traditional music festival.

There is the chance to see an abundance of Gaelic talent this Saturday, 19th January. During the afternoon a project between Tobar an Dualchais and the University of the Highlands and Islands will be showcased at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The performance is under the musical direction of Julie Fowlis and Anna-Wendy Stevenson. It is an exciting collaboration to create a new musical suite to celebrate Scotland’s heritage of song and music

On Saturday night at the Old Fruitmarket the internationally-renowned Skye College Sabhal Mòr Ostaig will be celebrating with performances from past and current tutors, alumni and students. Performers will includie Julie Fowlis, Alasdair Fraser, Fergie MacDonald, Dáimh, Christine Primrose and Margaret Stewart – plus very special guest Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, of Limerick University’s Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, this promises one mighty 40th birthday ceilidh.

An alternative, perhaps more lively option for Saturday night but still within the Gaelic realm is Kila with Mánran at the O2 ABC when dynamic and fresh sounds from Scotland and Ireland will be performed.

Two of Scotland’s foremost Gaelic talents Maeve MacKinnon and Joy Dunlop will both be performing at the festival as will as Celtic Connections’ stalwarts Altan who performed 20 years ago at the inaugural festival. As ever they will be sure to give one of their fun-filled performances.

On 24th January winners of a 2012 Danny Kyle Open Stage Award, the young Glasgow five-piece Barluath – named for an ancient, fiendishly difficult piobaireachd embellishment – have garnered further plaudits for their debut album Source, a dynamic mix of Gaelic and Scots song with bagpipes, whistles, fiddle, guitar, bouzouki, bass, clarinet and piano.

There will be a world premiere of Dán on Thursday 24th January when the talents of 14 contemporary Celtic musicians unite – acclaimed bands Kan and Guidewires, Gaelic singer Alyth McCormack and the all-star Breton quartet of Jacques Pellen, Janick Martin, Etienne Callac and Geoffroy Tamisier – Dán is an ambitious, sea-themed collaboration seeking to rekindle ancient links and forge new ones between the kindred cultures involved. In tonight’s UK premiere, timeless traditional tunes and inspired improvisational passages interweave seamlessly in amongst freshly-penned compositions from Irish poet Theo Dorgan.

One of Scottish folk music’s most exhilarating live acts Dàimh will give a memorable performance at the O2 ABC on Friday 25th January. West Highland-based combo Dàimh recently opened another new chapter in their 15-year career. Having bade a regretful farewell to vocalist Calum Alex MacMillan, the band’s core instrumental quartet have now enlisted redoubtable Gaelic champion Griogair Labhruidh, with a new album due in early 2013, and tonight’s expanded line-up also featuring percussionist Donald Hay and double bassist Jenny Hill.

Flora MacNeill is the heir to a priceless family legacy of songs, absorbed at croft-house ceilidhs as a child on Barra, the great Gaelic singer was a veritable revelation for lowland, urban listeners at Hamish Henderson’s landmark Edinburgh People’s Festival Ceilidh in 1951. This performance will be an account of her remarkable life-story, which has subsequently included performances on the world’s most illustrious stages, is hosted by her daughter, singer and clarsair Maggie MacInnes, and features some of her most iconic songs, performed by the Boys of the Lough, Ireland’s Peadar Ó Riada and the Cúil Aodha choir, among other special guests – none more special, of course, than the lady herself.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum will be the perfect setting for Andy Thorburn’s beautiful choral work Tuath du Deas (North and South) on 27th January. Written in Scots, Gaelic, English and Latin for 12 singers this piece evokes Scotlan’s human evolution over two millennia. It features specially-written text by Aonghas MacNeacail, in honour of whose 70th birthday the original cast have reconvened, including Rod Paterson, Mary Ann Kennedy, Elspeth Cowie, Alyth McCormack, Christine Kydd, Mary Macmaster, Heather Macleod and Lindsey Black, Corrina Hewat and Rory Campbell.

Across the final weekend of Celtic Connections there are some more opportunities to hear Scotland’s native tongue. One of Scotland’s finest emerging singer songwriter’s, in Gaelic and English, Mànran and Bodega frontman Norrie MacIver launches his own band line-up at Oran Mor on Friday 1st February. Also performing on this night across the city in the Glasgow Art Club are Cruinn who bring together four of Scotland’s leading Gaelic singers – James Graham, Fiona Mackenzie, Brian Ó hEadhra and Rachel Walker. Cruinn also showcases their collective multi-instrumental talents, in a richly-appointed repertoire of traditional, contemporary and original material.

At Celtic Connections 2013 there is also the opportunity to attend a free talk on the Origins of our Tongue (Tùsan ar Cànain). Audiences are invited to join the University of the Highlands and Islands language specialists Dr Donna Heddle, Director of our Centre For Nordic Studies and Professor Rob Dunbar, Director of Soillse, with guests Dr Christine Robinson, Director of Scottish Language Dictionaries and J Derrick McClure, Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, for a lively evening of discussion and debate about the origins of Scotland’s indigenous languages. The talk will be chaired by comedian and frequent television and radio contributor, Susan Morrison, this evening of quick-fire wit and wisdom, featuring four eminent academics confined in one room, is not to be missed.

For the first time in 2013 there will the Celtic Connections Song School at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum which offers a wide range of singing workshops which includes the opportunity to learn Gaelic Songs with Darren Maclean.

Source: Celtic Connections

Tam Coyle has DJ’d at a myriad of high profile events including T in the Park and the official Hogmanay parties in Edinburgh, Glasgow’s George Square, and Stirling Castle. He has also provided a soundtrack for the Tartan Army manoeuveres across the globe, and has appeared at the prestigious SXSW music event in Austin, Texas. Having kept local crowds dancing into the small hours at the Tall Ships in Lerwick last year, Tam returns to DJ at the first ever Up Helly Aa Hop in Mareel. With the assistance of one of the noisiest and liveliest crowds he’s ever encountered, he aims to keep the party going with a set to be enjoyed by everyone from 18 to 81.

At Fiery Sessions, audiences are invited to start off their Up Helly Aa celebrations with an afternoon concert from some of Shetland’s best traditional musicians in Mareel. The 2013 bill for the concert includes one of the brightest new additions to Shetland’s folk scene, Vair, featuring Ryan Couper, Jonny Polson, and the Peterson brothers, Erik and Lewie, who are sure to get feet stomping. The bill also includes duo Kaela Jamieson & John Hutchison; consistently popular and a must-see act.

People can also come along to Mareel after the procession to warm up with Stand Up Helly Aa – a belly-busting bill of great comedians, featuring John Gavin, Paul Pirie, and compered by the always hilarious Sandy Nelson. Sandy, originally from Glasgow, has been on the circuit for 15 years. He is also an accomplished playwright and actor best known as Chris The Postie in BBC Scotland’s Still Game.

Scottish Comedian of the Year 2009, John Gavin, offers tales of his home life with a wife and 3 young daughters as a 6ft tattooed man who has been subjected to far too much High School Musical and pink fluffy toys. John has established quite a career since he first starting performing in July 2008 when, without his knowledge, his wife put him forward for a competition for newcomers at the Edinburgh Fringe. He had never performed comedy before. He did so well he got through to the final of ‘So You Think You’re Funny.’ Despite his relative newcomer status, he’s gone on to perform at The Stand, The Comedy Store and is part of the Gilded Balloon circuit tour.

Paul Pirie began his stand-up career in 2006, quickly establishing himself on the Scottish comedy circuit. With a driving force for achievement, Paul worked his way into the London clubs and was launched onto the UK comedy scene, emerging as one of the biggest Scottish acts on the UK comedy circuit. Paul’s career has encompassed TV, (appearing in Ikea’s April 2011 comedy based TV advert), Film, and Radio, alongside his skill as a stand-up. His hilarity and comedic ability has earned him huge popularity with comedy goers and bookers across the world, gigging as far abroad as Australia and for diverse audiences such as The Armed Forces. Paul’s work is superbly individual and put simply, delivers a refreshing burst of laugh out loud comedy that leaves audiences in raptures.

Shetland Arts Marketing Officer, Lisa Ward, said: “It’s very exciting to be holding our annual Up Helly Aa day events, Fiery Sessions and Stand Up Helly Aa, in Mareel for the first time, and tickets are already selling out fast! And our first ever Up Helly Aa Hop with DJ Tam Coyle is also looking like it’s going to be a brilliant night. Tam knows how to create a set guaranteed to get everyone dancing.”

The Up Helly Aa Hop with DJ Tam Coyle is an 18+ event and tickets cost £20. Tickets available be via Shetland Box Office in Mareel & Islesburgh, over the phone on 01595 745 555, or online at www.mareel.org.

Fiery Sessions runs from 2pm-5pm, tickets cost £9 / £7, and all are welcome. Stand Up Helly Aa starts at 9pm and tickets cost £10. The show may include some adult content. Tickets for both events can be booked now via Shetland Box Office in Mareel/Islesburgh, over the phone on 01595 745 555, or online at www.mareel.org

Source: Shetland Arts

“ONE thing about the college I always remember is playing music week in and week out,” says the North Uist-raised singer, who recently sang on the soundtrack of the Disney film Brave, “singing at sessions, playing at sessions, late night ceilidhs. There was always music on the go, that was very much part of my life as a student.”

Julie Fowlis

YET Sabhal Mòr Ostaig has never completely left Fowlis behind, nor her it. After first studying there a decade ago, she recently returned for a Master’s degree in Material Culture and the Environment, and this year is artist with the Tobar an Dualchais/Kist O Riches national conservation, sound archiving and digitisation project, which is based at Sabhal Mòr. “I still feel like Sabhal Mòr Ostaig is very much part of my life in lots of ways,” she says with obvious affection.

Initially established in old steadings at Ostaig Farm in 1973 (the name translates as “the great barn of Ostaig”), the initial aim for Sabhal Mòr Ostaig was to build a Gaelic library and eventually to create an educational establishment which would allow both Gaelic speakers and Gaelic learners to be educated using the language and within the environment in which it flourished. The man behind it was Sir Iain Noble – founder of merchant bank Noble Grossart, holder of the first Gaelic cheque book and campaigner for Gaelic road signs, amongst many other things – and one of his original board members was Sorley MacLean.

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig

Since then the college has expanded to become a modern degree-level educational establishment, albeit with surely one of the most distinctive settings in Europe, and yet its strong and deeply-rooted links to and development of the cultural life of the Scots Gaelic community is such that a concert like this doesn’t seem out of place.

“The whole purpose of the college is the furtherance of the Gaelic language and culture,” says Allan Henderson, music tutor and recording studio manager at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, musical director of the 40th anniversary concert and a member of Blazin’ Fiddles, “and of course music and the arts are a huge part of that, you can’t have one without the other. The language can’t survive without music, and there are very good historical reasons for that within Gaelic culture as a whole.”

Allan Henderson puts his best foot forward with Blazin' Fiddles - Ian Macfarlane is on the far right

Henderson explains that the language’s profile has really grown since Sabhal Mòr Ostaig was established, that it was given no real status or prominence back in the early days when the college was established and that now it’s almost an affirmation for speakers that they can come to a place of learning whose selling point is that the first language is Gaelic. “You only have to look at what’s happened on the mainland,” he says. “There are now very few Gaelic speakers in Mallaig or Arisaig, but there are still significant numbers in the south of Skye. There’s no doubt that Sabhal Mòr has played a big part in that.”

Fowlis agrees. “I’m lucky enough to come from a Gaelic family,” she says, “but I didn’t have that much confidence to speak it, so it was a great boost to spend time where I could study the language in depth and study the culture and the history. Certainly I didn’t get the opportunity to study these at school level, the exploration into identity and culture and belonging. It formed a great part of the course (at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig) and it was a very enjoyable.”

Henderson notes that although the music course at Sabhal Mòr has only relatively recently been established, the musical heritage of the college is written into its DNA. “One of the things about the Gaels is that we’ve always made time for music,” he says. “We’re very appreciative of it, whether it’s part of our working life or our social life, it’s always there, it’s always key. It doesn’t matter whether we’re at a low ebb or things are going well, music is how we express ourselves.

“The college reflects that. Our music degree has been up and running for only five years or so, but music has always played a huge part in college life here. It’s incredible how many of our students and staff are actually musicians themselves.”

This month’s concert in Glasgow will reflect that breadth and richness of talent. Henderson picks out Fowlis herself as one of the artists of most widespread repute who will be appearing, while he also names house bandmember Iain MacDonald, up-and-comers the Angus Nicolson Trio, and fiddler and longtime Sabhal Mòr summer school tutor Alasdair Fraser as among the highlights.

Fowlis also names Fraser, as well as Margaret Stewart and singer Christine Primrose, while both are of course hearty in their praise for Irish concert pianist Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, from Limerick University. “He’s been a longtime friend of ours here,” says Henderson, “and very supportive of what we’re trying to do.”

Margaret Stewart (photo Euphoria Photography)

For Fowlis it will be just like her good old student days, which really weren’t so long ago. “There’s been a wealth of talent through the college,” she says, “so I think it’ll be a really nice atmosphere at the concert, just lots of friends getting together and playing music. It should feel like a very natural and organic thing to take to the stage together, it’s not going to feel forced at all, even though there are a lot of people who don’t necessarily play together that often. The type of music it is and the backgrounds we all come from, though, we’ll all have shared a lot of the music over the years at Sabhal Mor. So it’ll be a lovely gathering to put on stage.”

The Sabhal Mòr Ostaig 40th Anniversary Concert is at Celtic Connections at the City Halls, Glasgow, on Saturday 19th January.

© David Pollock, 2013

Links

• Celtic Connections
• Sabhal Mòr Ostaig

“We’re really excited about our involvement in the programme this year,” explained James Fraser, Principal and Vice-Chancellor. “The partnership makes great sense as many of our courses and research outputs reflect the traditions, culture and heritage of the Highlands and Islands.

“We are delighted to increase our involvement this year during the 40th anniversary celebration of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig UHI. It’s nearly two years since we became a university, and we hope that with academic partners of the calibre and prestige of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig UHI, we can attract potential students from the whole of Scotland and further afield to study our specialist subject areas such as history and archaeology, Gaelic and music at campuses all over the Highlands and Islands.”

The University’s varied programme of music and free lectures and discussions begins on Saturday 19th January when students will present an exciting joint project between Tobar an Dualchais – set up to preserve, digitise, catalogue and make available online several thousand hours of Gaelic and Scots recordings – and the University to create a new musical suite to celebrate Scotland’s heritage of song and music. Under the direction of Julie Fowlis, Oscar-nominated for her song Touch the Sky from the Disney-Pixar movie, Brave, and tutor Anna-Wendy Stevenson, this concert will feature cross-genre collaborations between students working on the innovative new BA (Hons) Applied Music, who are based all over the Highlands and Islands.

Three free lectures and a lively discussion on the origins of our tongue begin on Wednesday 23rd January at the BBC in Glasgow where Margaret Mary Murray, Head of service at BBC Alba, will talk about Gaelic language in the media. Dr Iain MacInnes from the University’s Centre for History presents his lecture on royal punishment of rebels, traitors and political enemies in medieval Scotland on Thursday 24th January; and on Thursday 31st January, audiences can hear Julie Gibson of the University’s Department of Archaeology present “Rising Tides: Climate change and the loss of our coastal heritage”, accompanied by music composed by BA Applied Music students. Using Orkney as a case study, where one third of all known sites are threatened, Julie’s lecture will travel, island by island, looking at the loss, and showcasing some of the potential for investment. All of these lectures are FREE but are ticketed from www.celticconnections.com

In addition on Wednesday 30th January, there’s a chance to exchange views with some eminent Scottish language experts, when the University’s Dr Donna Heddle, Director of the Centre for Nordic Studies and Professor Rob Dunbar, Director of Soillse, with guests Dr Christine Robinson, Director of Scottish Language Dictionaries and J Derrick McClure, Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, debate the origins of Scotland’s indigenous languages.

Details of the University of the Highlands and Islands’ events are on our website. For more information on Sabhal Mòr Ostaig @40 at Celtic Connections and the rest of 2013 go to www.smo.uhi.ac.uk . Tickets for all events are available at www.celticconnections.com

Luchd-obrach agus oileanaich an oilthigh a’ dol air an àrd-ùrlar aig Celtic Connections

Bidh luchd-obrach agus oileanaich on Oilthigh as ùire an Albainn a’ dol air an àrd-ùrlar aig an fhèis chultarach gheamhraidh as ainmeil an Albainn sa Bhliadhna Ùir, is e sin Celtic Connections. Le measgachadh de cheòl, cànan, eachdraidh agus arc-eòlas, taisbeanaidh Oilthigh na Gàidhealtachd agus nan Eilean na h-oileanaich agus na sgoilearan aige do luchd-èisteachd a bhios cruinn ann an Glaschu às gach ceàrn den t-saoghal, agus e uaibhreach a bhith na chom-pàirtiche foghlaim sa ghnothach.

“Tha sin gu math togarrach mun phàirt a tha sinn a’ gabhail sa phrògram am-bliadhna,” thuirt Seumas Friseal, am Prionnsapal agus Iar-Sheansalair. “Tha an com-pàirteachas a’ dèanamh mòran cèille leis gu bheil iomadh gin de na cùrsaichean is na toraidhean rannsachaidh againn stèidhichte air traidiseanan, cultar agus dualchas na Gàidhealtachd is nan Eilean.

“Tha sinn anabarrach toilichte pàirt nas motha a bhith againn am-bliadhna an àm do Shabhal Mòr Ostaig UHI a bhith a’ comharrachadh 40 bliadhna on thòisich e. Tha cha mhòr dà bhliadhna on thàinig sinn gu bhith nar n-oilthigh, agus tha sinn an dòchas le com-pàirtichean acadaimigeach aig a bheil inbhe is cliù cho àrd ’s a th’ aig Sabhal Mòr Ostaig UHI, gun tèid againn air daoine anns am bi adhbhar oileanaich a thàladh às gach ceàrn de dh’Albainn agus nas fhaide às, a bhith ag ionnsachadh nan cuspairean speisealaichte againn mar a tha eachdraidh is arc-eòlas, Gàidhlig is ceòl air àrainnean air feadh na Gàidhealtachd is nan Eilean.”

Tòisichidh prògram an Oilthigh de chaochladh ciùil agus òraidean is deasbadan gun phàigheadh Disathairne 19 Faoilleach nuair a bhios oileanaich a’ taisbeanadh pròiseact co-phàirteach togarrach eadar Tobar an Dualchais – a chaidh a stèidheachadh airson na mìltean de dh’uairean an uaireadair de chlàraidhean sa Ghàidhlig agus sa Bheurla Ghallda a ghleidheil, an cur ann an cruth digideach, catalog a dhèanamh dhiubh agus an tairgsinn do dhaoine air an eadar-lìon – agus an t-Oilthigh, a chruthachadh sreath ùr de phìosan ciùil airson dualchas òrain is ceòl na h-Alba a chliùthachadh. Sa chuirm-chiùil seo, fo stiùireadh Julie Fowlis, a chaidh ainmeachadh airson Oscar airson an òrain aice Touch the Sky on fhilm Brave le Disney-Pixar, agus an neach-oideachaidh Anna-Wendy Stevenson, bidh co-obrachadh eadar oileanaich a tha ag obair le diofar sheòrsaichean de cheòl air a’ chùrsa ùr-ghnàthach airson BA (le urram) ann an Ceòl Gnìomhaichte, agus a tha air an suidheachadh air feadh na Gàidhealtachd agus nan Eilean.

Tòisichidh sreath de thrì òraidean gun phàigheadh agus deasbad beothail air tùsan ar cànain Diciadain 23 Faoilleach aig a’ BhBC ann an Glaschu far am bi Mairead Màiri Mhoireach, Ceannard seirbheis BBC Alba, a’ bruidhinn air a’ Ghàidhlig anns na meadhanan. Bidh an t-Oll Iain MacAonghais o Ionad Eachdraidh an Oilthigh a’ toirt seachad na h-òraid aige air mar a rachadh reubaltaich, brathadairean agus nàimhdean politigeach a pheanasachadh leis na rìghrean sna linntean meadhanach an Albainn Diardaoin 24 Faoilleach; agus Diardaoin 31 Faoilleach, cluinnidh luchd-èisteachd Julie Gibson o Roinn Arc-eòlais an Oilthigh a’ toirt seachad “An làn ag èirigh: Atharrachadh na gnàth-shìde agus mar a tha dualchas na h-oirthire againn a’ dol air chall”, le ceòl air a dhèanamh le oileanaich on chùrsa BA ann an Ceòl Gnìomhaichte. A’ gabhail Arcaibh mar eisimpleir, far a bheil an treas cuid de na làraichean aithnichte ann an cunnart, siùbhlaidh òraid Julie bho eilean gu eilean, a’ coimhead air na chaidh a chall, agus a’ taisbeanadh cuid de na ghabhadh dèanamh a thaobh airgead a chur an seilbh. Tha na h-òraidean seo air fad GUN PHÀIGHEADH ach tha feum air tiocaidean o www.celticconnections.com

Cuideachd, Diciadain 30 Faoilleach, bidh cothrom air iomlaid bheachdan le sàr-eòlaich cliùiteach an raon chànanan na h-Alba, nuair a bhios an t-Oll Donna Heddle, Stiùiriche Ionad an Oilthigh airson Rannsachadh Lochlannach, agus an t-Àrd-ollamh Rob Dunbar, Stiùiriche Shoillse, leis an Oll Cairistìona Robasdan, Stiùiriche nam Faclairean Albais agus J Derrick MacLiuthar, Àrd Òraidiche Urramach aig Oilthigh Obar Dheathain nan aoighean, a’ deasbad thùsan chànanan dùthchasach na h-Alba.

Tha fiosrachadh mu thachartasan Oilthigh na Gàidhealtachd agus nan Eilean air an làraich-lìn againn. Airson tuillidh fiosrachaidh mu Shabhal Mòr Ostaig aig 40 aig Celtic Connections agus an còrr de 2013 theirig chun www.smo.uhi.ac.uk . Tha tiocaidean airson nan tachartasan air fad ri am faotainn aig www.celticconnections.com

Source: UHI

OCTOBER 2012 saw the ninth annual Mariafest monologue festival at the Ivan Franko theatre in the Ukranian capital of Kiev.

MARIAFEST has been established as a significant event in Ukraine’s cultural calendar, honouring the country’s renowned actress Maria Zankovetska (1854-1934) and offering performances by some of the finest theatrical talent from Eastern Europe.

The festival is ably and energetically directed by Lara Kadyrova, laureate of the National Schevchenko Prize and People’s Artist of Ukraine. During the festival there is an international conference embracing and uniting the worlds of literature and theatre, presided over by Dmytro Drozdoyvski, deputy editor of Vsesvit magazine (‘The Universe’).

Larysa Kadyrova, director of Mariafest, and Dmytro Drozdovskyi (Hamish MacDonald)

Established in 1925, Vsesvit is Ukraine’s leading literary journal which through its features and translations over ten decades – across Soviet and post-Soviet eras – has maintained a vital connection between the country’s literature and that of the wider world.

Dogstar Theatre Company had already forged its own links with Ukraine in 2007 when the company first travelled to the Ternopil Theatre Festival and L’viv Youth Theatre to perform its production of Seven Ages. The company returned in 2010 with Matthew Zajac’s The Tailor of Inverness – a story embracing much of western Ukraine and eastern Poland’s troubled modern history – and was performed at the Golden Lion Theatre Festival in L’viv, at Lutsk, and at the Kyiv Mohyla University.

Matthew Zajac in The Tailor of Inverness

The Tailor of Inverness was subsequently translated into Ukranian to feature in Vsesvit magazine. The company was invited to Mariafest 2010 when I travelled to Kiev to attend the festival and to present a paper ‘The International Languange of Theatre’ to the international Mariafest conference – reflecting upon the universal appeal of theatre and upon Dogstar’s own experience as an international touring company.

When the opportunity arose to attend Mariafest 2012 I was only too happy to accept, and to be able to contribute to the conference by presenting a paper in celebration of the bicentenary of one the world’s foremost literary figures, Charles Dickens. Whether through literature, film or TV adaptation, the work of Dickens has been appreciated and loved by every generation since he first began serialising stories and novels for the popular press more than a hundred and seventy years ago. How’s that for literary longevity?

In this age of the banking crisis, global debt and the profound gap in personal wealth that has been widening at an alarming rate since 1980 (recently exemplified by BBC 4’s Park Avenue – Money, Power and the Dream), perhaps it is no surprise that Dickens’ stories, often embracing personal struggle, suffering and the acute social maliase caused by societal divides should read as powerfully today as they did in the nineteenth century.

Kiev (photo Kiev Travel)

Kiev is a truly beautiful city. It appears not as one city but two, the ancient historical heart on the rising hills, crowned by golden domed churches, its parks and terraces hanging high over the River Dnieper with its island hydro-parks and resorts. Beyond the green islands with their trailing willow trees, over on the flat side of the river a monolithic concrete outline reaches into the sky, houses, factories, offices, power stations, the functional proletarian communities of the Soviet days, appearing at first sight from the older city like some magnified Springburn or Wester Hailes, the two communities joined by strips of concrete that rise on pillars over water and land, by arched and cantilevered bridges.

The whole city is connected by the Metro, going out into the open air of the modern precincts and deep under the hills of the ancient. In the district of Darnytsya concrete underpasses are filled with the colour of flower-sellers, traditional accordion music goes out from the buskers, with its shops and retaurants and hotels it all seems somehow more integrated, less dysfunctional, not as threatening or bleak as many of the post-war schemelands of Scotland. But this of course is only one small part of the city and it may well be a different story elsewhere.

By night buskers promenade through the train carriages, in Khreschaty Park it is not unusual to see some religious procession going past, whispering in prayer with an ikon held to the fore, no doubt a common sight to the ordinary passer-by but appearing to the stranger as it emerges from under the shade of the trees as if out of some thickly oiled picture of Old Russia.

Mariafest offers two molologue perfromances per day in the smaller 200-seat auditorium at the Ivan Franko Theatre. The first performance I watched was the Moscow Armenian Theatre’s dynamic re-telling of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice, made universally famous by Ted Kotcheff’s 1966 film starring Ingrid Bergman, featuring only the actress in her appartment, the opening scene revealing some torn-up photographs and a telephone.

Moscow Armenian Theatre's The Voice

Moscow Armenian Theatre’s production was designed and directed by Slava Stepanyan. Actress Zita Badalyan’s journey of breakdown and despair was told with impassioned and reflective effect, moving between bouts of grief and rage to the safer haven of recollections of better times with her estranged lover, emblemized by a silent actor recalling her to memory through an upheld mirror. The foreground featured a male figure fashioned out of thin copper wire, a substanceless form remaining only in outline as the increasingly frenetic woman finds her life spiralling out of control – and answering to a dead telephone line.

Following this matinee a powerful evening performance was given by veteran Polish Actor Boguslaw Kierc of My Corpse, an epic dream of life, love and death viewed from behind the curtain of mortality, written and directed by Boguslaw Kierc from the lines of Poland’s greatest Romantic nationalist poet Adam Mickiewicz, with only a stark light, a walking stick and a glass of water between actor and audience. Standing mostly stalk-still for the duration of the performance, Kierc held the theatre spellbound with the sheer power of language and facial expression alone, climaxing in the shattering of the water-glass gripped between trembling hands.

The following day’s matinee found Belorussian actress Olena Dudych give a sensitive and heartfelt delivery of the story of Edith Piaf in The Sparrow Who Growls, followed that evening by Laryssa Kadyrova’s tribute to the woman in whose name the festival was founded, Maria Zankovetska. When Two Are Separated visits the famous Ukranian actresses’ life from the point of estrangement from her second husband, the actor Nikolai Sadovsky whom she met in an army barracks in the Principality of Moldavia during her first husband’s military service and who persuaded her to venture to a new life in the theatrical profession.

Maria Zanovetska Museum (www.worldwalk.info)

Maria Zankovetska became a renowned actress in Ukraine, in Russia and throughout Europe. Her story reads like something from the pages of an epic classical novel and Laryssa Kadyrova’s amazing and elegant performance resurrects not only the story but the spirit of a great Ukranian artist.

During Mariafest a day is given over to the aforementioned International Conference held in the Ivan Franko Theatre, which focused this year not only on Dickens but on Ukraine’s great dramatist of the modernist era, Les Kurbas, founder of the legendary Theatre Nights in Ternopil and the daring experimentalist who worked from his studio in Kiev and would go on to present his ground-breaking drama in the Berezil and Kharkiv theatres.

Despite having a background in socialist idealism and revolutionary Bolshevism, in the late 20’s Kurbas’s work came under the increasingly watchful scrutiny of Soviet authoritarianism, with his plays eventually reduced to charges of ‘subversive organisation’ and ‘bourgeoise nationalism’. Kurbas was pronounced unfit for developing Soviet art and utlimately arrested, his life ended by execution in Sandarmokh in 1937 when a number of Ukranian intellectuals were shot under Stalin’s orders in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution.

The conference reflected upon the legacy of Kurbas’ work and its continuing importance, upon the life and work of Dickens in the novel and in cinema, and more broadly upon the social and political challenges faced by the performing arts in the age of globalised mass consumption and ever-changing media and audience needs.

Evridika featured a piece of physical theatre from Russia, performed by Yana Likhotina, moving from ground level to the upper air on perilously balanced step-ladders, between a theoretical heaven and hell. Remaining firmly in a dark place Anna Slubik’s performance of Zhan Rasin’s Fedra opened with unnerving discordance and foreboding. With the Polish actress appearing in deathly pale make-up the story of adulterous and incestuous betrayal was illustrated at times by the use of two hand-held effigies in a production that was unrelenting in its tearing open of the tortured soul of its protagonist.

The day was rounded off by a superb performance of Ticket to Heaven by Milka Zimkova from Bratislava, Slovakia. It can be something of a challenge to take in such a concentration of plays in any situation let alone in a range of Eastern European languages. When the spoken language is scarcely understood this requires another kind of engagement altogether, concentrating instead on rhythm, imagery and ultimately upon the connection between actor and audience.

Not to worry – although I’d loved to have got the jokes in Ticket To Heaven that had the audience roaring out loud at times, in every nuance and expression Milka Zimkova’s performance might as easily have been by some Scottish Everywumman, a Glasgow wifie or Torry quinie sitting down at the kitchen table, sharing innermost secrets and reflecting upon the faded love of extended matrimonial life. Judging by what was happening onstage and by the audience reaction this was clearly a fine piece of intimate theatre, full of warmth and observation and with the common touch that would have worked in any language.

Once again Mariafest invited us on an excursion to the beautiful sights of Kiev, to Lavra with its incredible reconstruction of monasteries and bell-towers that fell to the ravages of World War Two, dwarfed under the monstrous Soviet Victory monument on the adjacent hill, the hollow metallic statue holding up her sword and shield and affectionately known – or so I’ve been told – as ‘Old Tin Tits’.

To St. Michael’s gold-domed cathedral and the statue of Cossack warrior Bodhan Khmelnitsky ascending on his horse, his mace pointing in symbolic gesture back in the direction of Moscow. To the house of Maria Zankovetska who is the reason we are here, a careful reconstruction of the actresses’ home that had fallen victim to fire and then to demolition before being reopened in 1989, now a dedicated museum housing photographs, playbills and theatrical costumes that tell the story of her life.

The final performance I was to take in was Richard After Richard performed by Lidia Danylchuk, directed by Iryna Volystka, a cabaret style grotesquerie in which Richard III’s adversaries are played by – a sack of cabbages – each systematically given the chop in manic rhythmic fashion by a range of dangerous looking kitchen knives held magnetically in the form of a shining heraldic shield before their determinidely villainous purpose is revealed.

Lidia Danylchusk’s dissecting of the cabbages was truly unique – circling around the table, sending up a fountain-like spray of green as the knives drummed into the flesh of the vegetables, the floor now a seething organic mess of homicide and destruction.

You’ve probably twigged by now that Mariafest ventures to combine the traditional with the less conventional. So this was it for Mariafest 2012, the festival celebrates the theatrical form of the monologue and we hope to be able to respond to the invitation to return next year to the tenth anniversary of Mariafest with The Tailor of Inverness. Thank you once again to Laryssa, to Iryna and to Dmytro and to all those involved at Mariafest, to Vsesvit and the Maria Zankovetska House, and to the supporting institutions of Mariafest.

Mariafest is held with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Ukraine, the National Academic Theatre of Ivan Franko and the International (Ukraine) charitable foundation of the International Institute of Theatre. The conference is supported by the Taras Schevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Hamish’s travel to Ukraine was supported by Creative Scotland’s International and Conferences Investment Programme.

© Hamish MacDonald, 2012

Links

• Dogstar Theatre

YOU KNOW what it’s like when it’s your turn to choose the DVD.

YOU’RE tense, you’re nervous, you laugh a bit louder at the jokes, scream a bit more at the scary bits. Because you’ve made yourself a little bit vulnerable. It’s about your taste after all. Up close and personal. Which actually could be the motto of the Cromarty and Resolis Film Festival, now in its 6th year – Up Close and Personal, and unique in many ways.

The Angel's Share - a Gala screening this year

The by-line for this film festival is My Favourite Film Festival, because guests are invited to choose their 5 favourite films, and the committee select one of them to screen. In its 6 years so far the festival has welcomed an impressive array of guests to share their personal cinema favourites and to stay around awhile to watch and talk and eat curry.

Kirsty Wark, Sanjeev Kohli, Eddi Reader, John Byrne, writers Ali Smith, Ian Rankin and AL Kennedy, politician Charles Kennedy. Plus a selection of Scotland’s own brilliant film-makers – Sherlock’s Paul McGuigan, Dr Who’s Douglas Mackinnon, Last King of Scotland’s Andrea Calderwood, Hallam Foe’s David Mackenzie, Rob Roy’s Michael Caton-Jones, and probably Scotland’s most revered producer, Iain Smith – all people at the top of their game with fascinating insight into the business, but all of whom gave of their wisdom and experiences in a chummy, cosy settting. Audiences actually do come away from these sessions feeling not only enlightened but also like they’ve just had a gratifying gossip in Grouchos. Definitely Up Close and Personal.

Cloaked by the fabulous backdrop of Cromarty and its neighbouring parish Resolis, the Committee really make use of the Gothic atmosphere that descends upon the town in deep mid-Winter. There are open-air screenings with braziers and mulled wine, torch-lit walks up to The Stables – venue for gloaming and late night screenings. Animated films are projected onto the mothballed Lighthouse; the warm and welcoming Sutor Creek Cafe is the venue for couthy Scottish gems. The Old Brewery becomes the Festival Hub and offers a chance for a breather and a welcome blether over heart-warming soup, inspiring talks or a dip into the Scottish Screen Archive. And the Gala event on the Sunday night – a curry feast, a fantastic film, and a wee bit of music, is snuggled in to the lovely community atmosphere of Resolis Hall.

Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall

And so to this year, the festival looks like another cracker. Added to the venues mentioned this time also the Highland Travelling Cinema, the Screen Machine, will make an appearance for its first outing away from its regular circuit.

Among the guests will be the legendary politician Tony Benn, and they will be showing Will and Testament, a deeply moving intimate documentary portrait of the great man, followed by his favourite film which will be Brassed Off, which includes a tour-de-force performance from the late very great Peter Postlethwaite.

Rhona Cameron, comedian and writer will be there, and her chosen film is Woody Allan’s classic Annie Hall. She’ll be quizzed about life, love and what cinema meant to her when she was growing up in Mussleburgh.

Enzo Staiola in Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves

Screenwriter Paul Laverty, long-time collaborator of Ken Loach’s, in a previous life was a Human Rights Lawyer in Nicaragua which gave him the inspiration for his first feature script, Carla’s Song. His favourite film on this occasion will be the beautiful Italian classic Bicycle Thieves, and this year’s Gala Event will screen his latest hugely popular film, The Angel’s Share.

As if this wasn’t enough also making an appearance will be Moray-based Michael Start, of the House of Automata, who made the models for films like Hugo and the eerie dolls and toys in the Woman in Black, both of which will be screened during the weekend. Armourer Carl Summersgill will give audiences insight into his experiences on films such as the Clash of the Titans and the Eagle of the Ninth. And the lovely Scottish Screen Archive People will be back with a selection of gems with Highland connections from their vaults.

It is worth mentioning, and again this is quite unique, that this film festival is run almost entirely by a volunteer committee – it really is a labour of love and it shows. They work to make themselves sustainable by doing things like creating and selling a beautiful poster of images of ridiculously photogenic Cromarty. But they also get funding from Regional Screen Scotland and other organisations – most happily The Co-op. This year is the International Year of Co-operatives and to celebrate the committee’s relationship with (and on-going support from) the local Co-op membership, the Festival will be screening The Rochdale Pioneers, a recently completed film about the Co-operative movement.

So it’s all go for a full and frantic weekend of all things film.

Comfortable? Certainly. Eccentric? Probably. Magical? Undoubtedly.

And films that mean so much somehow, when seen with people who long for you to like them, no matter who they are.

The 2012 Cromarty Film Festival runs from 30 November until 2 December.

© Lindy Cameron, 2012

Links

• Cromarty Film Festival

2012 marks a significant milestone in the history of Inverness Film Festival which has emerged in recent years as a leading cultural event.

THE co-direction of Paul Taylor and Matt Lloyd from 2006-2008 and the vision of Eden Court Cinema Programmer Paul Taylor as director since 2009, have consistently raised the profile of IFF and of the Eden Court Cinema as a premier venue. Each November the quality and integrity of the Eden Court Cinema’s annual programme is further distilled into five days of the very best in local, national and international cinema with features and shorts unable to be seen anywhere else.

In celebrating this year’s 10th anniversary, IFF 2012 reflected the evolving language of world cinema from the silent era to the present day; featuring newly restored and hidden classics, special events bringing the earliest Scottish and Highland filmmaking to life and 20 Scottish premieres including; Amour, The Hunt, I Wish, Kaddish For A Friend, Final Cut-Ladies and Gentlemen, Quartet, Great Expectations, Seven Psychopaths, Safety Not Guaranteed and Sightseers.

Amour

Challenging subject matter and pure cinematic excellence defined IFF’s opening gala with the Scottish premiere of Michael Haneke’s Amour starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert. Nominated for 6 European Film Awards (to be announced in December) and the recipient of the Palme d’Or award at Cannes (2012), this is an intensely powerful and humane work, as emotionally affecting as it is confronting.

Austrian Director Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon, Hidden, The Piano Teacher, The Seventh Continent) delivers an unflinching study of unconditional love and mortality with extraordinary performances from Trintigant and Riva. Their portrayal of an elderly Parisian couple, George and Anne, succeeds in bringing the audience to awareness beyond the screen as we witness Anne’s inevitable decline after a series of strokes, cared for at home by her devoted husband. In a world in constant denial of ageing and death Haneke presents the audience with a mirror, enabling transference from the two main characters and their predicament by framing them as part of a concert audience in the opening sequence. With the camera pulled back the central protagonists are as we are within the crowd, and the music they hear performed, Schubert’s Impromptu Op. 90 No. 1 in C Minor with its tentative and singular melodic line, immediately establishes our inevitable participation individually and collectively in the unfolding narrative. The lone voice of the piano informs our reading of an audience dressed in uniformly grave tones and visually sets the tone of exploration for what follows.

What tempers Haneke’s characteristically bleak vision is human warmth within the intimate domestic space of George and Anne’s apartment, conveyed by subtle use of light and in the nuances of expression that allow us to witness George and Anne’s love for each other in all its hues. As we witness the sadness and humiliation of daily routines trying to cope with failing body and mind, the minute details of their relationship; her growing despair at the indignity of her condition and his tested devotion in the face of death, our conception of love on screen and in life is consistently challenged, bound as it is here to suffering rather than Romance or sentimentality.

With the possible exception of Caspar Noe’s Enter The Void, I have never seen an audience so utterly silent during and after the credits. In Amour, Haneke shows us ourselves; our fears, our loss of those we love and our own inevitable fate; thankfully he and his actors also powerfully convey what allows humanity to endure. In the midst of her decline whilst looking at photographs of their younger selves Anne remarks; “its beautiful – life – so long – long life” each pause poetic in its contemplation. As George seals up their interior life together and leaves the apartment, we know that while he still breathes Anne lives.

The final scene in which their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) sits in her parent’s apartment ambiguously contemplating their absence, or perhaps her own, seems to speak of a generation. Throughout the film Eva’s dialogue; talking to the wall above her Mother about house prices, her shrug when she says that she thinks she loves her partner Geoff and her comment that her Mother needs more “efficient treatment” speaks of her concern, ultimately for herself. Never one to shy away from social critique, Haneke presents us with an image of a generation in George and Anne’s ineffectual daughter and the nurse who George dismisses for her lack of care.

Haneke’s acute way of seeing, the brutality and compassion distilled in Amour, creates a superbly crafted film of universal relevance with stunning performances from its two leads. Whilst easy crowd pleasing openers are the norm at most festivals, this bold choice was entirely justified by the audience reaction and the sheer quality of the production. There are films that populate the cinema and those that need to be screened and it is gratifying to see the latter given prominence as an opening gala, setting a benchmark for the rest of the festival.

The Hunt

Winner of three awards at Cannes in 2012, including Best Actor for Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt explores the emotive subject of a nursery teacher falsely accused of child abuse. Mikkelsen gives a career best performance as the teacher at the centre of this complex and riveting drama which in its conclusion reveals much about human behaviour and contemporary society. The fears and assumptions of the audience are consistently put to the test with our judgement of innocence or guilt subject to the same paranoia infecting the town. There is also inner conflict between the wider inference of potential innocence and the acute need for justice.

When resolution comes it is as ambiguous as select moments in the film in which judgement is made by a look or a shadow of doubt, engulfing reason within a closely knit Danish community and in the audience as witness. Set against culturally specific rituals of Christmas and the rite of passage first hunt, Vinterberg’s treatment of the subject is broader than its immediate context. Whether a truth or a lie the scenario is sadly, entirely plausible and the truth an ever shifting mark. Although it is profoundly unsettling, this is a film which examines wider ramifications of its subject in terms of how we deliver justice, the nature of innocence and childhood denied by both the media and perpetrators of abuse.

The degree to which we are all complicit in some way is exemplified by the final scene in which the central protagonist’s life remains irreversibly damaged and we are left with the feeling that we’ve been holding a gun all along, either out of righteous protection, fear or paranoia. This is an extremely difficult subject but throughout the intelligence and sensitivity of Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm’s script prevails; innocence is championed – both that of the child and the falsely accused. The camera as our eye is beautifully directed by cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen and adds psychological weight to every frame of unspoken dialogue. The Hunt is both a thriller and a powerful work of social realism, marking a significant comeback from Vinterberg; one of the founders of the Dogme 95 movement and recipient of multiple awards including the Jury Prize at Cannes for his 1998 film Festen (The Celebration).

A consistently strong element of IFF is the screening of work by first feature directors which this year included Scott Graham, Shell (Scotland), Brandon Cronenberg Antiviral (Canada), Leo Khasin Kaddish For A Friend (Germany) and Tim Connery Easton’s Article (USA).

Shell

Based on his award winning short of the same name, Scott Graham’s Shell is an intense and promising debut. Filmed near Gairloch the story of the relationship between a teenage girl and her father living in remote petrol station combines the expansiveness of its setting with the intimacy of human relationships amplified in isolation. Shell feels internationally Northern and distinctly Highland in its aesthetic. Although the deer symbolism is laden and there is a feeling that international interest and perception of the region has had an influence on the creative trajectory in development, Shell is an accomplished piece of work and an important milestone for Graham as an emerging director.

Yoliswa Gärtig’s adept cinematography is suffused with light and a muted palette drawn directly from the landscape. The human figure within the frame is beautifully composed, at times compressed like a Schiele drawing allowing the viewer to feel the emotional centre of core relationships. The camera moves in such a way to allow us to linger on details of the domestic interior as a powerful psychological space. When Shell sits in the bath with just her hands in close up, they tell us all that we need to know about that moment of her being.

Although this is a distinctly interior and sometimes claustrophobic film, the way the central character embodies the surrounding environment is visually poetic and expansive; a scene in which she lies in a field, her body becoming another layer we read within the landscape or a moment of shifting light across a field after her ill fated encounter with Adam become self reflexive. Within the beauty of this imagery there is also an ambiguous edge. Shell’s comment at the dinner table that eating deer is “like eating your own flesh” turns the character and the environment in on itself. Stylistically Graham’s restraint and sensitivity as a Director is to be applauded. When Shell emerges from the petrol station to confront tragedy she is filmed from behind, we do not witness her reaction through the shock of facial expressions but feel it viscerally the moment she opens the door – hit by an icy blast that catches her hair and our breath at the enormity of her loss.

Shell is a fascinating character for exploration; not understood by those around her, not a child but not yet a woman, living in an environment where passing customers are the only contact with a world beyond her own, intensifying the nature of her only constant relationship with her father. Despite her social isolation she is not naïve, there is an almost otherworldly knowing within the character and a longing misinterpreted significantly by the men she comes into contact with. Chloe Pirrie gives an exceptional performance as Shell, her awareness deeply embedded in her eyes, with excellent support from Joseph Mawle as her Father Pete, Michael Smiley as Hugh and Iain De Caestecker as Adam, conveying their character’s motivations with great economy and skill.

The modulation of Mawle and Pirrie’s performances are perfectly pitched as father and daughter, although the relationship is predictably fated in its dramatic conclusion. There is comparatively little dialogue but great exchange between sound and image; “I Love you” as words spoken proceeded by the sight of a frozen hook and chain hanging outside. The indifference of nature in relation to human scale and the film’s design; vaguely modern times but no particular era, gives a feeling of timelessness and universality to the story. With a second project in development we will hopefully see Graham’s next production at a future IFF.

Kaddish for a Friend

Selected and introduced by IFF Youth Programmers Laurie Paul and Alexander Scott, Kaddish For A Friend by Leo Khasin transfers the Palestinian conflict to Berlin in the story of the friendship between a 14-year-old Palestinian refugee Ali (Neil Belakhdar) and his elderly German/Jewish Neighbour Alexander (Ryszard Ronczewski). Ultimately it’s the human element rather than politics that is central to this touching and very enjoyable film. The two lead performances have natural ease and charm and although idealised the heart of the production is resoundingly aspirational.

I Wish

The feel good film of this year’s festival was I Wish by Hirokazu Koreeda (Nobody Knows, Still Walking), an uplifting, beautifully observed study of childhood in all its innocence, curiosity and exuberance. The humour in I Wish was an unexpected delight and the interactions between children and adults characterised by warmth and insight. In the hands of a less accomplished and empathic director the story of two brothers separated by their parent’s divorce could so easily have descended into melodrama and sentimentality, especially with the added promise of a miracle; but the miracles here are the blissful everyday things all around us if we would only pause long enough to perceive them and the moment of growth that Koichi’s wish embodies as two mythic/ordinary trains pass by.

Koki and Oshiro Maeda’s performances as the irrepressible Ryunosuke and his older, more introspective brother Koichi are a total joy to watch and the way that Grandparents and a school nurse are co-conspirators in their adventure is knowingly compassionate and humorous. I Wish is a rejuvenating experience that doesn’t subvert the difficulties of modern life in childhood fantasy, but presents the possibility of happiness and contentment in the smallest details of everyday life. Hopefully it will return in March 2013 when it is scheduled for national release.

The Pleasure Garden

New digital restorations of classic British films featured prominently this year, including David Lean’s grand epic Lawrence of Arabia celebrating its 50th anniversary, Alfred Hitchcock’s first complete silent film The Pleasure Garden (1925) and his final silent Blackmail (1929) (in its second version Britain’s first talkie) with live accompaniment from Australian pianist Wendy Hiscocks. It is always fascinating to see the evolving vision of a director unfold in their earliest work; from the morality tale of two dancers in The Pleasure Garden to the stylistic development in Blackmail which contains all the burgeoning seeds and obsessions of Hitchcock’s later and best known films.

From his first silent to his last, guilt and morality become progressively distilled in the heightened tonality of what would later define the psychological thriller. Hiscock’s live performance of The Pleasure Garden was seamlessly fluid, evoking the style and energy of the period, interpretative of the characters and their motivations without resorting to clichéd leitmotifs or the trappings of illustration. The expanded tonality of her playing is perfectly matched to the material and I would have loved to have seen her live interpretation of Blackmail which is arguably the more complex work of the two.

Aelita - Queen of Mars

A rare screening of Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars with live music Minima also featured at this year’s festival; a curious hybrid of Soviet propaganda and Sci Fi fantasy whose design has influenced successive generations of artists and film makers. The rediscovery of this and other neglected gems was one of the great pleasures of IFF 2012, returning to the earliest surviving films as a wellspring of inspiration.

The documentary Extraordinary Voyage directed by Sege Bromberg and Eric Lange charting the twelve year colour restoration of George Méliès Trip To the Moon (1902) provided a wonderful introduction to Méliès as creator, the process of restoration and to the screening of the original work which followed. Restored by the Groupama Gan Foundation For Cinema and the Technicolor Foundation For Cinema Heritage with an original soundtrack by French band Air, Trip To the Moon like much of Méliès work is a mesmerising combination of film, theatre and magic, at a time when cinema was still in its infancy and special effects were created live on set.

Trip to the Moon

There is a naivety in Méliès which is enduringly appealing and it was wonderful to see the digital restoration preserve the imperfections of time and the brushstrokes of hand colouring in the final version, pieced together from 13,375 colour fragments and a comparative black and white print. What this film still inspires 110 years after it was made is the timeless wonderment of moving images; conjuring dreams, illusion and imagination out of fragile celluloid.

In the documentary Side By Side: The Science, Art and Impact of Digital Cinema, Keanu Reeves investigates photochemical film and digital production with interviews from cinematographers, film students, editors, exhibitors and directors including Steven Soderbergh, Christopher Nolan, Joel Schumacher, David Lynch and Martin Scorsese. With debate raging about the transition to digital both in the creation and delivery of cinema, director Christopher Kenneally presents the subject from all viewpoints, engaging with what we lose and gain in a period of accelerated technological change and consumption.

Significantly at this year’s IFF only two films were 35mm prints, the rest were in digital format reflecting this global transition. With a younger generation increasingly watching film in a myriad of ways, often in isolation or in transit, on computer screens or iPhones, the experience of popular culture feels very much like endless Google searching, never remaining on any one homepage long enough to delve too deep. With cheaper access to equipment, telling stories about ourselves has become a cultural norm; however, the democratisation of this technology without being tempered by visual literacy or an understanding of the crafting of moving images arguably produces quantity rather than quality, sensation rather than understanding.

Side By Side

It is really a question about the function of art and why we need cinema in the first place. This is well articulated throughout the film on both sides of the debate, raising essential questions about the nature of digital production. Contemporary life is a continuous bombardment of digital images so disposable and transitory that we haven’t actually stopped to conceive an adequate means of preserving them. While celluloid film stock could still capture and store images, maintaining the current trajectory, years from now there won’t be a trace of anything we’ve expressed digitally. The choice to use film because it is the most appropriate medium to tell the story you need to tell is rapidly disappearing, like oil painting being perceived as obsolete simply because watercolours are cheaper and generate a higher volume of profit.

While the creative possibilities of digital are incredibly exciting, expanding the visual toolkit, crucially “you still need the eye of an artist to create the code”. Artistry and technological innovation have always driven film as a means of expression, human aspiration and entertainment, sometimes creating work that is timeless and universally relevant, vastly outliving its maker. Martin Scorsese’s comment about the continuation of culture in relation to the next generation – “where do you go to go back to the well?” – feels particularly apt, and education will be vital in the future as a source of cultural renewal in the face of digital and corporate takeover.

In spite of an electrifying programme that revealed everything film is and can be, the element of education beyond screenings was largely absent from the festival and needs to be addressed in future programmes. The social and cultural phenomenon of going to the movies has fundamentally changed but our need for Art, from shadow play on cave walls to the latest digital release, has always been constant. We need stories to make sense of ourselves and of the world. In a secular society, a contemporary culture of “Me” and “Now”, we need those connections and imaginative space for reflection now more than ever.

The winner of the annual IFF Audience Award designed by Steve Dilworth was Final Cut – Ladies and Gentlemen, Hungarian director György Pálfi’s euphoric homage to cinema, with Amour second and The Hunt in third place as the most popular films. (Sadly it is unlikely that Final Cut will be shown again outside the festival; however, Amour will be screening again from the 30th November and The Hunt from the last week in December.)

Final Cut

Final Cut – Ladies and Gentlemen plays out the age old story of boy meets girl, editing clips from 500 existing films together from all eras of world cinema and stripping the Romance genre down to its barest elements. The film begins with awakening followed by the ultimate visual film quiz delivered in rapid succession to the unfolding fortunes of love found, gained, lost and rediscovered. More akin to a feature length You Tube Mash Up than the sophistication of Christian Marclay, Final Cut operates on the principle of triggering memory and familiar emotional responses. The simplicity of the story meets collective expectation, its arc resolved in a final reassuring embrace.

There are clever sequences such as the splicing of multiple screen goddesses to Hayworth’s ‘Put The Blame on Mame’ from Gilda or the accelerated rhythm of pursuit, but the thrill and seduction of this film really lies in reading your own memories of cinema into it; the element of identification not just with the titles or stars but the whole emotional ride of self projection. Aptly described by IFF’s Director as “the greatest mixed tape ever made”, this is a work of pure nostalgia and reverie, a hit list of icons, film moments and personal memories that like a really good fairground ride once experienced you want to get straight back on again.

What Is This Film Called Love?

A homage of a different kind What Is This Film Called Love? by director Mark Cousins is the antithesis of his epic 15 hour series The Story of Film: An Odyssey in interest, depth and relevance. His declaration that his walking tour accompanied by a photograph of Sergei Eisenstein is “not trying to change the world in any way” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Punctuated by self-conscious literary and artistic quotations, this is a strange hybrid of pretension and spontaneity, a hand-held ready made stream of consciousness of little interest to anyone but its maker.

There are moments of clarity amongst the self indulgence but not nearly enough to stave off boredom. Screened with Ivan The Terrible Part 2, selected by Cousins to accompany his film, What Is This Film Called Love? is an interesting premise but is ultimately too self-absorbed to lead the audience deeper into either of its human subjects or their imaginative territory. It is the kind of film celebrated by the internet where everyone’s reality is up there to be shared and that’s exactly where this film belongs, although its screening at festivals is sure to generate healthy debate.

IFF continued its commitment to the screening of short films from Scotland and the UK with a series of short fiction and documentaries including the apocalyptic Saved by Stuart Elliot, Eva Riley’s insightful exploration of the relationship between two sisters in Sweetheart, Zachariah Copping’s descent into addiction, love and loss, Foxy and Marina, and Paul Cox’s incisive documentary Steve Dilworth – A Portrait, examining the relationship between the artist’s environment and creative process on the Isle of Harris.

Originally commissioned for the centenary of the Hippdrome Cinema, Boness (1912-2012), Scotland’s first purpose built cinema, The Lost Art of The Film Explainer brought the historical context of cinematic storytelling vividly to life in performance and discussion. A tradition that began in the UK during the silent era when cinema managers stepped in to say what was happening because not all members of the audience could read, the lost art of the film explainer has strong traditions in Germany and in Japan where foreign films required both cultural translation and translation of inter-titles.

Frank McLaughlin, Andy Cannon and Wendy Weatherby

Entertaining Scottish Storyteller Andy Cannon, cellist/composer Wendy Weatherby and piper/guitarist Frank McLaughlin performed live accompaniment to three films drawn from the Scottish Screen Archives; Buy Your Own Cherries (1904) St Kilda: Britain’s Loneliest Isle (1923/1928) and Mairi – Romance of a Highland Maiden (1912), one of the earliest story films made in Scotland and first screened at the Central Hall Picture House, Inverness, on 20 May 1912. Amazingly the grandson of the romantic lead was in the audience having heard about the existence of the film just a week earlier. Filmed on the shores of North Kessock and featuring possibly the slowest chase in cinema history, the film was created by Andrew Paterson and re-edited in 1953 by local film maker and Playhouse Cinema Manager Jimmy Nairn. Nairn’s legacy was also highlighted during the festival with the Inverness Local History Forum’s 20th anniversary screening of films from Scottish Screen archive introduced by SSA curator Alistair Bell.

In performance The Lost Art of The Film Explainer reinterprets and invigorates archival material in a way that gives a modern audience the opportunity to experience human history live through music, spoken word and moving image. There is much scope for international research and exchange in relation to cinematic traditions of the explainer in the UK, Germany and the Benshi tradition of narration in Japan that will hopefully result in the development of future performances. The underscoring of traditional and original music/ song by Wendy Weatherby and Frank McLaughlin enhanced the images on screen allowing the images to them to speak for themselves, while Andy Cannon’s commentary on the action, characters and social context illuminated the past in a way that a lone screening never could. There are many ways into cinema and this event illustrated beautifully the value of research, passion and live performance to bring archival material into the light, stimulating curiosity and connections between local and global traditions of storytelling and acknowledging the community of cinema.

In its tenth year IFF is an event that its Director and Eden Court can be immensely proud of. In each successive year the festival continues to showcase all that film can be; distinctive for the depth, range and quality of programming, committed in its support of local product and bringing excellence in world cinema to a growing audience. In the last 120 years our relationship to cinema has irrevocably changed, however within the scope and vision of IFF 2012 the magic of George Méliès or the miraculous everyday captured by Hirokazu Koreeda take us within and outside ourselves in a way that no other art form can. Cinema is limitless imagination projected on screen and this year’s festival celebrated that restorative vision with intelligence and joy, reflecting innovation and new ways of seeing from the silent era to the latest releases and pre-release productions. In answer to Mr Scorsese’s question about wells of inspiration, they are to be found right here.

© Georgina Coburn, 2012

Links

• Inverness Film Festival

dulled by winter stodge at the sixth annual Food on Film Festival in

Kingussie. Happily, when you leave the cinema, your mouth watering,

there is a marketplace of delicious food on offer in the Festival’s

own Food Hall, showcasing dozens of gourmet food suppliers.

About to launch its sixth season, Food on Film has grown year on year

in its offering of foodie films and film-worthy food, as well as the

numbers attending.

The 2013 Festival promises a banquet of delicious surprises, including

the Scottish Premier of “Papadopoulos & Son” set in a Greek fish

and chip shop. The premiere will include film-themed food served to

guests in their cinema seats, with a side dish of Greek dancing by

Creative Dance Development Workers from Inverness’s Eden Court

Theatre. It’s going to be a feast for the eyes, ears and taste buds.

“Kalí óreksi” is the Greek for “bon appetit” and it’s

bound to be a call resounding around Kingussie in February.

31st January to 3rd February 2013 at The Badenoch Centre, Spey Street,

Kingussie

Source: Food On Film

Scottish fiddler extraordinaire Duncan Chisholm, who was the first musician ever to perform at Celtic Connections in 1994 with his band Wolfstone, will be in attendance along with singer songwriter Sorren Maclean. Sorren is in the early days of his musical career and will be performing in the New Voices programme at next year’s festival. Also helping launch the programme was banjo and fiddle player Celine Donoghue, who has been an inspirational part of the Education Programme at the festival. Tickets for Celtic Connections go on sale at 9am on Thursday 25 October on the newly launched website www.celticconnections.com

Among the artists appearing at Celtic Connections 2013 are The Mavericks, Transatlantic Sessions with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Old Crow Medicine Show, Salif Keita, Kate Rusby, Carlos Núñez & the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Amy Helm, Dougie MacLean, Roddy Hart and the Lonesome Fire, Fiddlers Bid, Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, Aimee Mann, Caravan Palace and Bellowhead.

20th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS

The 20th Celtic Connections festival will have a retrospective feel looking back over the success of the last 20 years and the ethos and artists that helped shape it. The Opening Concert at Celtic Connections 2013 will epitomise this with an array of artists taking part who have performed throughout the last 20 years. As the festival has grown, many of the featured artists have grown up with it, or reached new audiences via its stages. Over the years they have joined the intricate, ever-expanding and increasingly globe-spanning network of musical relationships forged and renewed each January. This celebratory concert also reflects back on the Scottish and traditional-based sounds that have always been Celtic Connections’ primary inspiration. Performers include Sheena Wellington, Eddi Reader, Julie Fowlis, Capercaillie, the newly reformed Flook, Cara Dillon, Chris Stout, Dick Gaughan, Finlay MacDonald, the Scottish Power Pipe Band and a specially-convened festival string ensemble helmed by Greg Lawson.

Alongside the array of artists performing at the Opening Concert who have been involved with the festival since its inception there are many artists returning in 2013 that performed at the maiden festival in 1994.

Irish singer-songwriter Paul Brady is one such artist and he will be returning to the festival to perform highlights from his recent anthology Dancer in the Fire which features 22 of his favourite tracks from his 45-year back catalogue of sophisticated songcraft and adventurous, stylistic range. Also on this double bill is Heidi Talbot, who performed at the first festival with Cherish the Ladies. Heidi has built an international audience for her enthralling voice and singular interpretative finesse with her new album Angels Without Wings. She will be accompanied by John McCusker, Ian Carr, Ewen Vernal, Phil Cunningham, Julie Fowlis and Louis Abbott.

As one of the first performers at the festival, Galician piping superstar Carlos Núñez requires no introduction. This fascinating performance will be alongside ex-Albion Band member, turned early music specialist, recorder virtuoso Philip Pickett. Scottish and Irish tunes’ prominence in the 16th century mix is the Celtic Connection behind this sparkling concert.

The New Voices strand has traditionally brought together creative musicians and allowed them to experiment and showcase their new work within this established series. Since its inception in 1998, New Voices has showcased 70 new commissions and given audiences the chance to hear new work from brilliant young composers. To celebrate these connections at the heart of the festival for so many years there will be a reprise of Duncan Lyall’s Infinite Reflections and Angus Lyon’s 3G.

BIG NAMES AT THE FESTIVAL

A number of big names are eager to come along and help celebrate the 20th Celtic Connections festival in style. Americana string band Old Crow Medicine Show will be lighting up The Barrowland Ballroom with their boundless energy and spirit. Old Crow’s classic single Wagon Wheel received the RIAA’s Gold certification for selling over 500,000 copies in late 2011.

After their reunion earlier this year The Mavericks will be showing off their famous no-borders fusion of country, garage, Latin, soul and torch-song sounds with fresh passion and deep-dyed maturity.

Celtic Connections shares its 20th anniversary with folk aristocrat Kate Rusby who is celebrating two decades in the music business this year with her 11th album 20. Kate’s new album comprises newly-recorded favourites from throughout her much-garlanded career.

Known as “the golden voice of Africa” Salif Keita will be set to impress with his cross-fertilisation of his native griot traditions and other West African sounds with pop, jazz, Latin and Islamic influences. Keita’s music has evolved from largely electric, synth-based fusions to the soulfully rootsy, organic approach of his latest acclaimed album, 2010’s La Différence.

Amy Helm will be leading a tribute to her late father Levon Helm who passed away earlier this year. Levon achieved fame as the drummer and frequent lead and backing vocalist for The Band.

Ireland’s Cara Dillon will give a beautiful performance with the consistently world class BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. This special concert will feature gorgeous new arrangements of songs from across her gem-studded back catalogue.

Celtic Connections will welcome Córdoba-born, Latin Grammy-winning maestro Vicente Amigo for the world première performance of his new flamenco/Celtic project Tierra. Performing alongside Vicente is Mike McGoldrick, John McCusker, Guy Fletcher, Danny Cummings and Ewen Vernal.

Little Feat rank among rock’n’roll’s great survivors. Their Southern-fried gumbo of blues, funk R&B, country and multi-guitar fireworks will be sure to delight both their loyal army of fans and new admirers.

TRANSATLANTIC SESSIONS

Celtic Connections 2013 will be showcasing a very special Transatlantic Sessions to celebrate the festival’s 20th year. It’s been something of a landmark year for the Transatlantic Sessions, which followed up its longest sellout tour to date, around the UK and Ireland in early 2012, with its first ever performance in the US, a centrepiece of Celtic Connections’ showcase programme at September’s Ryder Cup Handover Ceremony in Chicago, heralding the contest’s coming to Scotland in 2014. Acclaimed singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter will make her Transatlantic Sessions debut. Creator of a slow-seasoned, richly hybrid sound sometimes dubbed “new world blues”, singer and guitarist Eric Bibb was a natural choice for this year’s line-up having collaborated on his 2012 release Deeper in the Well not only with the Transatlantic Sessions’ joint musical director Jerry Douglas, but another returning regular, multi-instrumentalist and all-round Southern roots authority Dirk Powell, in whose Louisiana studio Bibb’s album was recorded. Also performing from Stateside are Crooked Still vocalist Aoife O’Donovan, currently winning rapturous plaudits for her solo work, and multi-talented old-time virtuoso Bruce Molsky. Home-grown guests include the golden-voiced Teddy Thompson, who continues to carve out his own acclaimed style of highly literate, subversively catchy roots-pop, and bewitching Scottish folk singer and songwriter Emily Smith, whose latest album is due in 2013. Douglas’s co-director Aly Bain helms the customary all-star house band.

FOLK AND TRAD AT THE HEART OF THE FESTIVAL

At the heart of the festival is the vibrant folk and traditional music scene, with some of the UK and Ireland’s finest musicians set to raise the roof this January and February. Artists include Scottish folk rockers Skerryvore, Irish quintet Goitse and folk singer and guitarist Nic Jones will be performing alongside his son Joseph and Belinda O’Hooley. Gaelic infused folk/rock band Mànran will also be returning to this year’s festival alongside Irish folk band Kila. Young Highland hotshots RURA will be taking to the stage supported by singer-songwriter Norrie MacIver and his band. The 2009 Radio Scotland’s Young Traditional Musician of the Year Rua Macmillan and his band will be headlining at the Oran Mór.

Scottish Fiddler Duncan Chisholm will be performing his spellbinding Strathglass Suite in the beautiful surroundings of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Solas will be performing Shamrock City which is a body of music both honouring the Irish experience as the backbone of the US industrial revolution and addressing current debates over immigration. This performance will feature archive and newly-shot film footage from Butte, Montana, nicknamed Shamrock City.

One of today’s most incisive, articulate and exquisitely expressive singer-songwriters Karine Polwart will be performing songs from her fifth album Traces which has been greeted with critical acclaim since its release earlier this year.

Brooklyn based fiddler Jeremy Kittel is a fast-rising star of contemporary Celtic music whose headlining performance will be sure to showcase his bold, yet sensitive, traditional arrangements.

Once again, the festival spotlight shines on Gaelic talent. The life and songs of the great Gaelic singer Flora MacNeil will be celebrated in a night hosted by her daughter, singer and clarsair Maggie MacInnes and features some of her most iconic songs, performed by the Boys of the Lough, Karen Matheson, Ireland’s Peadar Ó Riada, and the Cúil Aodha choir, among other special guests – none more special, of course, than the lady herself.

COLLABORATION AND CAMARADERIE

The festival’s famous spirit of camaraderie will once again bring together high profile artists from the worlds of folk, roots and rock for a string of unique collaborative shows.

A resplendent example of local music attaining global calibre, the all-Orcadian line-up and repertoire of The Gathering will showcase several generations of Orkney’s richly distinctive folk culture. The line – up includes veteran moothie ace and storyteller Billy Jolly, folk ace Kris Drever, award-winning fiddler Kristan Harvey, accordion legend Billy Peace and most of the eight-man musical juggernaut The Chair, all brought together in superb style by musical director and fiddler Douglas Montgomery.

Dán is a project that combines the talents of 14 contemporary Celtic musicians – acclaimed bands Kan and Guidewires, Gaelic singer Alyth McCormack and the all-star Breton quartet of Jacques Pellen, Janick Martin, Etienne Callac and Geoffroy Tamisier. This new collaboration seeks to rekindle ancient links and forge brand-new ones between the kindred cultures involved with this performance.

Co-founder of The Incredible String Band, Mike Heron will team up with Glasgow’s own Trembling Bells to perform new arrangements of ISB classics along with other anthems of the era, a programme originally devised for Heron’s 70th birthday in 2012.

When the now internationally-renowned Skye college Sabhal Mòr Ostaig first opened its doors in 1973, the Gaelic landscape was a very different place. The language’s ongoing revival, not least through music, can be substantially traced to this trailblazing institution’s work. The performance includes a vast cast of past and current tutors, alumni and students – including Julie Fowlis, Alasdair Fraser, Fergie MacDonald, Dàimh, Christine Primrose and Margaret Stewart – plus very special guest Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, of Limerick University’s Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, and promises to be one mighty 40th birthday ceilidh.

The rich local traditions and beautiful landscapes of the Dingle peninsula, in Ireland’s County Kerry, have long been a magnet for musicians. The Heart of Dingle is the culmination of a sharing of styles and repertoire between Scottish and Irish musicians including several specially-written tunes and an extended suite composed by Edinburgh fiddler Marie Fielding. The star-studded performance also features guitarist Donogh Hennessy, bassist Trevor Hutchison, singer Pauline Scanlon, accordionist Tom Orr, pianist Gordon Midler, singer and multi-instrumentalist Méabh Begley, fiddler Jeremy Spencer and accordionist Damien Mullane.

WORKING WITH OTHER FESTIVALS

Celtic Connections 2013 will bring a taste of other events to the festival.

Since its inception in 1997 Celtic Colours in Cape Breton has been one of Celtic Connections’ closest kindred festivals, building on the island’s unique Scottish and Gaelic heritage. This Cape Breton ceilidh will showcase some of its leading contemporary stars including Mary Jane Lamond and Wendy MacIssaac.

Following its successful debut as a week-long city-centre event last March, the Glasgow St Patrick’s Festival will host a collaborative concert to showcase the UK’s Irish musical diaspora, featuring 13 musicians from four different cities. A Glasgow contingent of eight, largely drawn from the Comhaltas/St Roch’s Ceili Band ranks, might seem like an unfair home advantage, but there’s little doubting that London-born accordion firebrand Damien Mullane (with ex-Lunasa guitarist Donogh Hennessy), Leeds guitar/piano/fiddle duo Chris O’Malley and Des Hurley, and Manchester singer-songwriter, fiddler and tin whistle ace Grace Kelly will collectively hold their own.

THE INDIE STRAND

With the influence of folk on the indie scene the most prominent it has been for years, Celtic Connections once again features a top line-up of indie and rock artists in 2013.

Roddy Hart & The Lonesome Fire return to Celtic Connections 2013 to launch their brand new EP. Ahead of their eponymous album release in Spring 2013, the band will showcase an excitingly diverse collection of songs that bear witness to their year spent ensconced in a London studio with producer Danton Supple (Coldplay, Morrissey). Having been touted as one of the best bands in Scotland to see live Three Blind Wolves will be supporting. Their hugely anticipated first full-length album Sing Hallelujah for the Old Machine is due in early 2013.

Celtic Connections is delighted to be welcoming the shape-shifting outfit This is the Kit who make hushed, homespun, autumnal music that is layered around lead Kate Stables’ enchanting vocal and inventive wordcraft. Also on this double-bill will be Moulettes whose combination of celestial harmonies, sartorial eccentricity, distinctive instrumentation and sundry prog, pop, gypsy-jazz, funk and classical elements are sure to provide for a concert to remember.

In 2013 Aimee Mann will celebrate 20 years since her first solo release Whatever. Her performance is sure to showcase the qualities that underpin her music’s enduring potency: an unflinching fascination with human dysfunction, contradiction and frailty, together with trenchant lyrical economy and sophisticated pop savvy.

Dublin native Glen Hansard will be returning to Celtic Connections after being here last in 2010 as half of The Swell Season, alongside Czech fellow singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová, his co-star in hit indie movie Once, which also landed the pair an Oscar for Best Original Song. Earlier this year Hansard released his debut solo album, Rhythm and Repose, which has an eloquence and intensity which will be matched by his compelling live performances.

A WORLD OF MUSIC

The festival once again celebrates the connections between Celtic traditions and cultures across the globe.

The Sahara Soul Project is a defiantly inspiring collaboration which will unite artists from three of Mali’s different musical cultures. With his band Ngoni Ba, Bassekou Kouyaté is a modern-day pioneer of the ngoni, the banjo’s forebear instrument, boldly exploring new creative realms from his Fula tribal roots in southern Mali. From the country’s opposite end, young Tuareg outfit Tamishek have been hailed as worthy successors to Tinariwen, delivering a hypnotic blend of desert blues, dub beats and psychedelic rock, while the griot-descended Sidi Touré, from the currently beleaguered ancient northern city of Gao, interweaves old and new songs in the Songhai folk tradition.

A hugely influential giant of African music, Ethiopian multi-instrumentalist and composer Mulatu Astatke will be gracing the Celtic Connections stage. Mulatu enjoyed his original heyday during the 1960s and 70s, in both New York and Addis Ababa, pioneering the fusion of American jazz, funk and Latin sounds with his native traditional scales and melodies. Supporting Mulatu is flautist Lucas Santtana who has been hailed as a one-man Brazilian music revolution, cross-matching classic and contemporary styles with live and sampled sounds including reggaetón, electronic, classical music, indie-rock and tecnobrega.

The magnificent, otherworldly soundscapes of dissonant diaphonic harmonies of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares helped kick-start the whole world music movement 25 years ago and their performance at this year’s Celtic Connections will prove that they remain just as thrilling entertainers today.

After Mariza, 27-year-old Carminho looks set to become Portugal’s next major international fado star. She sings with a raw intensity and exquisite tenderness that carries a knockout emotional charge which will be sure to impress audiences at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

AMERICANA, COUNTRY AND BLUEGRASS

Some of the world’s most exciting Americana, country and bluegrass talent will visit Glasgow this January. Oklahoma native JD McPherson’s deceptively sophisticated songwriting will add a smart contemporary spin to the raw, booty-shaking rockabilly of his music.

US singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell will be performing tracks from her 2012’s Young Man in America which is a stunningly eloquent exploration and interrogation of her nation’s past and present.

American singer-songwriter and fiddler Sara Watkins, of Nickel Creek fame, will be showcasing her second solo album Sun Midnight Sun. Audiences will be treated to Sara’s assertive stylistic range which takes in souped-up classic pop, grungy rockouts and gritty electronic textures as well as her home neo-bluegrass territory.

Texas born Sarah Jarosz will be wowing audiences with a style of singing that transcends the boundaries between folk and pop. Nominated for a Grammy Award for her song ‘Mansinneedof’ this young American talent is sure to impress.

Canadian trio The Be Good Tanyas will be performing highlights from the comeback album A Collection (2000-2012) These three females will be sure to impress with their slow-burn vocal chemistry and handcrafted blend of old-time influences which will magically infuse in a seamless repertoire of traditional, contemporary and original material.

With 2013 marking 25 years since the Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Session album, a seminal early harbinger of the entire alt country movement, the band’s enduringly restive, exploratory spirit has most recently borne fruit in the Nomad Series, four themed albums ranging from darkly acerbic to inventively experimental, from country-folk ethereality to squally grunge-rock.

BLUES, JAZZ AND ELECTRO SOUNDS

A top line-up of blues, jazz and electro musicians will be lighting up the Glasgow winter next year. German cult heroes Mardi Gras.BB’s nine-strong band of massed brass, electric guitars, vocals, percussion and DJ will evoke the film noir atmosphere and lindy-hop/jump-jive dance crazes of 1940s New York.

The all-star sextet Heritage Blues Orchestra draw on the full panoply of American blues, from African-derived field hollers to New Orleans razzamatazz; soul and gospel fervour to fiery jazz workouts. Their music simultaneously celebrates this fertile history while refashioning the genre anew.

It was back in 1964 that The Animals became only the second British invaders after the Beatles to top the US charts, with ‘House of the Rising Sun’. Featuring founder member John Steel and veteran stalwart Mick Gallagher, The Animals remain famed for their hard-rocking rhythm’n’blues. For this Old Fruitmarket show they will be joined by iconic guitarist Steve Cropper, the all-round living legend of American soul.

Careering to the forefront of the burgeoning electro-swing vogue Caravan Palace have become a veritable sensation in their native France. ABC audiences will be sure to enjoy the band’s core fusion of gypsy-jazz, swing and high-octane electronica.

The eponymously-led US roots outfit Woody Pines have already added a sizeable Scottish following to their extensive home fanbase, combining country blues, ragtime, early jazz and jug-band styles with modern-day vaudeville showmanship and superb technical prowess.

BURNS AT THE FESTIVAL

There will be a number of events to celebrate our Scottish bard on Burns day which would not have been possible without the support of EventScotland’s Scotland’s Winter Festival programme.

There will be The Big Burns Night where new arrangements of Burns songs will be performed by some of Scotland’s finest folk performers including Breabach, Blazin Fiddles and Dougie MacLean.

Rabbie Round the World will be a global celebration of Burns featuring India’s Jason Singth (beatboxer) and Soumik Satta (Sarod) with Clinton Fearon and band from Jamaica and a number of special UK guests.

The Celtic Connections Burns Supper will be served in the beautiful surrounding of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum with music and song from Scotland’s finest performers.

THE NEW FACES OF FOLK

Fostering new talent and facilitating musical creativity is a core tenet of Celtic Connections. The Danny Kyle Open Stage, sponsored by the Evening Times, and BBC Radio Scotland’s Young Traditional Musician of the Year Final will continue to introduce and celebrate fresh talent in 2012.

This year’s New Voices commissioning strand, sponsored by the Sunday Herald, will see Sorren Maclean and Rona Wilkie premiere new works.

SHOWCASE SCOTLAND

Over the middle weekend of the festival, over 200 music industry delegates from around the world will descend upon Glasgow to experience some of Scotland’s finest musical talent. Showcase Scotland at Celtic Connections – the largest gathering of the international music community in Scotland – provides Scottish acts with the valuable opportunity of performing in front of promoters, record labels and agents from around the world. The Showcase Scotland international partner in 2013 is England, with six of the nation’s finest acts performing.

With 11 band members who hail from virtually every corner of the country and who incorporate jazz, funk, classical and music-hall into their lively take on traditional English tunes and songs, Bellowhead have done much in recent years to reinvigorate the English music scene and increasingly, beyond it too. Their multi-award winning re-workings of traditional ballads, broadsides and sea shanties have helped earn them a well-deserved reputation as one of the best live bands on the circuit in any genre. Midland born and London based singer-songwriter Sam Carter’s robust vocal stylings and virtuosic guitar playing places him in a lineage that includes such singular and illustrious talents as Martin Carthy, Martin Simpson and Nic Jones. Though a proud daughter of and frequent visitor to the Peak District, Bella Hardy, has recently relocated to Edinburgh. Her pure and bell like voice and her interpretation of English folk as well as accomplished original songs have bewitched festival and folk club audiences for several years. Flamboyant young singer, guitarist and concertina player Lucy Ward’s take on folk song is influenced by her Derby roots and the timeless quality of her idol, renowned singer June Tabor, but Lucy has most definitely carved out a striking and individual niche in her own right. From Bristol in the West Country hail Spiro, an instrumental band comprised of five outstanding musicians who blend traditional folk with classical and jazz influences in complex and highly imaginative ways. Fronted by the incendiary fiddle playing of BBC Radio 2 ‘Musician of the Year’ and the man known as The Newcastle Fiddle Player and The Tom McConville Band is one of the most highly respected four-piece bands operating on the traditional music festival circuit today.

FREE CONCERTS & WORKSHOPS FOR SCHOOL CHILDREN

Crowned Best Educational Event at the 2011 Scottish Event Awards, the Celtic Connections Education Programme enters into its 16th year in 2013. Over 5,000 children will enjoy three free schools concerts in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in January. For many of the children in attendance, this will be their first experience of live music. Although the 2013 festival’s schools concert programme is still to be announced, pupils can look forward to seeing highly acclaimed festival artists, with previous year’s school concert line-up featuring Mánran, Bobby McFerrin, Naturally 7, Laura Veirs and Treacherous Orchestra amongst others. A further 2,000 children will benefit from free in-school workshops led by professional Celtic musicians.

Donald Shaw, Artistic Director of Celtic Connections, said: “For the 20th anniversary we will be celebrating the artists and ethos that have made the festival such a success. We have some big names coming along to help us celebrate in January but there will also be some unique collaborative performances. At no other festival do musicians embrace the opportunity to collaborate with acts from different countries and musical genres quite like they do at Celtic Connections. As ever in our 20th year trad and folk will be at the heart of the festival but other musical genres such as world, jazz, blues, electro, Americana and Country will also be showcased.”

Councillor Archie Graham, Chair of Glasgow Life, said: “Celtic Connections began as a small winter festival programmed to fill a scheduling gap in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall’s normally quiet post Christmas period. Twenty years on and it has firmly placed Glasgow on the world music map and became a leading light in Scotland’s cultural calendar. The festival attracts people from all over the world and therefore contributes to a hugely positive economic impact not only for Glasgow but for the whole country.

Source: Celtic Connections

REGARDLESS of who the organisers book to appear every year, Loopallu is a special festival.

COME the end of September, Ullapool still catches the last scraps of summer sun and warmth, and the village looked beautiful here, as did the view over Loch Broom from the doors of the shore-side tent holding the festival’s only stage. Rain fell and the temperature dropped at night, but not enough to spoil things for the festival-goers camped out alongside the festival site.

Saturday headliners Scouting for Girls

This year’s line-up might not have troubled hipsters from the Central Belt to make the long journey up north, but it was perfectly gauged to appeal to as many people as possible, and to ensure the atmosphere was upbeat and lively, but not rowdy. Loopallu feels like it’s part of the way between being a regular pop and rock music festival and a proper Highland ceilidh, and the energy levels of the audience were up to the challenge.

After an opening procession by the Ullapool Pipe Band through the streets of the village and up to the festival’s gate, Friday’s highlights included Anderson, McGinty, Webster, Ward and Fisher, a Dundonian folk-blues outfit who are building a name for themselves after a busy summer of festivals, and whose rich and well-played live show is the only selling point they need.

In the evening, Glasgow rockers Kassidy and the Fratellis appeared one after the other, although they were both remarkably similar in terms of the noisy rock ‘n’ roll they play and the reactions they won from the crowd. Amidst apparent fan favourites like the ‘Traveller’ and ‘Stray Cat’, Kassidy’s most memorable moment came when singer Barrie-James O’Neill asked the audience to shout a message to his girlfriend Lana Del Rey into his phone to help get him out of “the bad books”, while the Fratellis naturally saw the tent go wild for their huge hit ‘Chelsea Dagger’.

Saturday continued in a similar view, with all-girl folk group the Staves, local heroine Rachel Sermanni and singer-songwriter Jake Bugg appearing before headliners Scouting For Girls – a pop act by the standards of most festivals, but again a big name who would unite the majority of fans in this tent.

The main stage was only half of the story though, with groups including traditional dance troupe Rhythmreel plugging the gaps between bands on the beer tent stage and a lively programme of late night pub sets around the village’s pubs, including Kassidy and Rachel Sermanni at the legendary Ceilidh Place. It felt at once like a more personal take on behemoths like Rock Ness and T in the Park, and a festival with a heavy dose of real Highland character.

© David Pollock, 2012

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• Loopallu

This weekend’s Annual General Meeting of Fèisean nan Gàidheal, being held in Fort William on Friday and Saturday, will hear that the organisation’s work in 2011-12 engaged over 40,000 people with nearly 6,000 Fèis participants, more than 3,000 benefiting from traditional music tuition in schools and nearly 8,000 attending Cèilidh Trail performances throughout the Highlands and Argyll during the summer of 2011.

Although its main remit is to support the work of local Fèisean, or festivals, Fèisean nan Gàidheal has been involved for several years in delivering a range of arts and Gaelic language based education and community services. The umbrella organistion, which now supports activities among 44 separate Fèisean, is to extend its reach by offering new services.

The organisation will launch Fèisgoil at its Annual Conference – a new service that will pull together various strands of education and community work. Fèisean nan Gàidheal plans to expand its work in these areas to include a new Gaelic teaching service. Fèisgoil will offer local authorities a valuable service that could help deliver non-certificated Gaelic teaching and areas of the Curriculum for Excellence relating to Expressive Arts, Health & Well-being and Literacy & Gàidhlig. The service could also assist local authorities and public bodies deliver commitments in their Gaelic Language Plans.

Arthur Cormack, Fèisean nan Gàidheal’s Chief Executive, said: “Fèisgoil is a development of a new approach to managing the various issues which emerge from time to time in Scottish schools where there might be little or no experience of dealing with Gaelic. We believe Fèisean nan Gàidheal could offer expertise to local authorities as they embrace opportunities offered by the Curriculum for Excellence to support Gaelic medium education. There are also aspects of Scottish Studies which we feel might benefit from our knowledge and skills base. The Scottish Government’s aspirations to give Scottish children the opportunity to learn three languages is a great step forward and we believe that we are ideally placed to offer local authorities help in providing the resources and skills required to make the initiative work in relation to Gaelic.”

Fèisean nan Gàidheal’s Chair, Catriona MacIntyre, added: “We all know that there are some areas where local authorities are challenged in terms of teacher supply and training which means they cannot always meet parental aspirations. Fèisean nan Gàidheal can help address these issues in collaboration with the authorities whilst contributing in the wider sense to the campaign to increase the number of people learning Gaelic throughout Scotland. School children could increase their Gaelic awareness at a number of levels and then make appropriate choices as they go forward and the changes in the curriculum offer them new opportunities.”

The main areas that Fèisgoil could assist with include Creative Scotland’s new Youth Arts Strategy and Talent Development investment; expansion in Gaelic education required at all levels, supporting Gaelic medium education and strengthening areas for improvement identified in the 2011 HMIe report Gaelic Education: Building on the successes, addressing the barriers; expansion in the use of Gaelic at community level through the organisation of Gaelic medium activities and events as part of Iomairtean Gàidhlig and independently of them and the Curriculum for Excellence requirement for young people to experience Scottish culture.

Arthur Cormack concluded: “While the use of non GTC-registered teachers in schools was not encouraged in the past, Curriculum for Excellence encourages the engagement of people from communities and outwith schools to enhance the educational experience for young people. The Youth Music Initiative has proved that good quality educational outcomes can be achieved by cooperation between classroom teachers and tutors delivering specific programmes of work that enhance pupils’ experiences. One of the main advantages of the Fèisgoil service is that local authorities could deliver Gaelic classes in a very cost-effective manner. They would not, for example, have to train their own teachers with the associated costs of obtaining cover for them while they undergo training. Fèisgoil tutors will be trained to the same standard as classroom teachers are to deliver GLPS. Funding available for GLPS could, therefore, be used entirely for delivery and, since the classroom teachers would have to be present during lessons, they could learn along with the pupils and continue with some Gaelic after a series of Fèisgoil classes ends.”

Fèisean nan Gàidheal’s Annual Report for 2011-12 will be published at its AGM on Friday September 21. It details how the organisation engaged with around 43,000 people during 2011-12; 5,922 young people took part in Fèisean; 3,191 pupils benefitted from traditional music tuition through the Youth Music Initiative delivered by Fèisean in each locality; 2,122 took part in Gaelic drama activities; 16,798 attended the 2011 Blas festival; 7,920 people attended Cèilidh Trail performances throughout the Highlands during the summer of 2011; 44 Fèisean were members of the umbrella organization; £299,811 was granted by Fèisean nan Gàidheal to local Fèisean; and FnG’s total expenditure was £1,408,055.

Fèisean nan Gàidheal a’ leudachadh an dèidh bliadhna shoirbheachail

Tha còrr is 40,000 neach air a bhith an-sàs ann an obair na buidhne Fèisean nan Gàidheal thar na bliadhna a chaidh, le suas gu 6,000 a’ frithealadh nam Fèisean, 3,000 eile ag ionnsachadh ceòl traidiseanta ann an sgoiltean agus faisg air 8,000 an-lùib nan Cèilidhean air Chuairt air feadh na Gàidhealtachd agus Earra-Ghàidheal tron t-samhradh 2011. Sin a-rèir fiosrachadh a thèid a thoirt do Choinneamh Bhliadhnail na buidhne annns a’ Ghearasdan air an deireadh sheachdain seo.

Tha Fèisean nan Gàidheal mar bhuidhinn air a bhith an-sàs ann an obair ealain, foghlam agus coimhearsnachd tron Ghàidhlig son grunn bhliadhna mar tha, ach a-nis thathas a’ coimhead ri saothar na buidhne a sgaoileadh gu raointean nas fharsainge seach a bhith a’ cumail taic ri na Fèisean a-mhàin. Thèid seirbhisean agus cothroman ùra nis a thairgse a bharrachd air a bhith a’ co-obrachadh leis an 44 Fèis a th’ann mar tha.

Nochdaidh iomradh air an leasachadh ùr Fèisgoil aig a’ Chruinneachadh Bhliadhnail anns a’ Ghearasdan, a’ mìneachadh mar a thèid diofar earrannan de shaoghal an fhoghlaim agus coimearsnachd a tharraing còmhla. Tha e an rùn Fèisean nan Gàidheal a-nis a bhith ag obair anns na raointean sin, a’ tairgse seirbheis ùr teagasg an Gàidhlig. Gheibh ùghdarrasan ionadail taic is cobhair a dh’fhaodadh cur ri teagasg Gàidhlig neo-fhoirmeil agus ann an raointean sgoile far a bheil obair a’ bualadh air a’ Churraicealam airson Sàr Mhaitheis, leithid nan ealan, slàinte, litreachas agus Gàidhlig fhèìn. Bidh cothroman ann cuideachd ùghdarrasan ionadail a chuideachadh agus a stiùireadh ann a bhith a’ dèiligeadh ri leithid Phlanaichean Gàidhlig.

Thuirt Stiùiriche Fèisean nan Gàidheal Art MacCarmaig: “Tro Fèisgoil, tha cothrom ann coimhead ri dhol an-sàs an suidheachaidhean a tha a’ tighinn am bàrr ann an sgoiltean air feadh Alba far nach eil eòlas mòr sam bith air a bhith a’ dèiligeadh ri gnothaichean Gàidhlig, agus cobhair a thabhann le sealladh às-ùr. Tha an t-eòlas sin aig Fèisean nan Gàidheal agus faodaidh sinn cur gu mòr ri na leasachaidhean a tha san amhrac aig ùghdarrasan ionadail tron Churraicealam airson Sàr-Mhaitheis ann am foghlam Gàidhlig. Tha taic ann a dh’fhaodamaid a thoirt cuideachd ann a bhith a’ leantainn Eòlas na h-Alba. ‘S e ceum mòr a th’ann gu bheil e an rùn an Riaghaltais cothrom a thoirt do dh’òigridh an Alba trì cànain ionnsachadh agus tha sinne dhen bharail gu bheil sinn mar bhuidhinn ann an deagh shuidheachadh airson a bhith a’ cur ris an stòras agus eòlas a tha a dhìth air leithid comhairlean airson a bhith a’ toirt taobh na Gàidhlig dhen obair seo gu buil.”

Thuirt Cathraiche Fèisean nan Gàidheal Caitriona Nic an t-Saoir: “Tha sinn uile mothachail gu bheil suidheachaidhean ann far nach urrainn do chomhairlean iarrtasan phàrantan son leasachaidhean Gàidhlig a choileanadh air iomadach adhbhar, leithid gainne luchd-teagasg. Tha sinne dhen bharail gu bheil Fèisean nan Gàidheal ann an deagh shuidheachadh cuideachadh le iomadach taobh de na leasachaidhean sin gus an urrainn dhuinn taic a chumail ris an iomairt airson àireamhan luchd-ionnsachadh fhàs, agus cuideachd fios is eòlas mun Ghàidhlig a sgaoileadh gu math nas fharsainge, feadh na dùthcha gu lèir. Tha cothromam mòra ann dhan Ghàidhlig an-lùib gach atharrachadh a tha a’ tighinn air foghlam.”

A-measg nan raon far am faodadh Fèisean nan Gàidheal cuideachadh a thairgse tha Ro-innleachd ùr a th’aig Alba Chruthachail airson Ealan Òigridh agus Leasachadh Thàlantan; an leudachadh a tha a dhìth air foghlam Gàidhlig aig gach ìre; taic a chumail ri foghlam tro mheadhan na Gàidhlig agus a’ neartachadh raointean obrach a chaidh a chomharrachadh ann an aithisg a dheasaich buidheann nan HMIe ann an 2011 air Foghlam Gàidhlig: A’ Togail air Soirbheachadh, A’ dèiligeadh ri Bacaidhean; leudachadh air follaiseachd agus cleachdadh na Gàidhlig aig ìre coimhearsnachd tro thachartasan Gàidhlig agus an co-bhuinn le Iomartean Gàidhlig; agus cuideachd na cothroman a tha an-lùib a bhith a’ cur ris an eòlas a tha òigridh gu bhith faighinn air cultar na h-Alba tro leasachaidhean anns a’ Churraicealam.

Thuirt Mghr MacCarmaig: “Ged nach robhas comhfhrutail le bhith a’ cleachdadh luchd-teagaisg aig nach robh teisteanas GTC roimhe seo, tha leasachaidhean ùra a’ cruthachadh suidheachadh far a bheileas a’ moladh a bhith a’ cleachdadh sgilean agus eòlas bhon choimhearsnachd taobh-muigh na sgoile airson a bhith a’ cur ri saoghal foghlam nan sgoiltean agus òigridh. Tha Iomairt Chiùil na h-Òigridh air dearbhadh gun urrainnear moran bhuannachdan a thoirt gu buil tro cho-obrachadh eadar luchd-teasgasg agus luchd-oideachaidh a tha a’ frithealadh phrògraman fa-leth airson eòlas chloinne a leudachadh. Bhiodh buannachdan mòra ann do chomhairlean a bhith a’ cleachdadh taic a tha èifeachdach a-thaobh chosgaisean airson a bhith a’ lìbhrigeadh clasaichean Gàidhlig. Cha bhiodh aca, mar eiseimpleir, ri luchd-teagaisg a thrèanadh agus cha bhiodh cosgaisean trèanaidh a’ tighinn orra. Bhiodh luchd-oideachaidh nam Fèisean aig an aon ìre trèanaidh ri luchd-teagaisg sgoile airson a bhith a’ lìbhrigeadh GLPS. Tha cothrom ann leis sin a bhith a’ cleachdadh maoin a tha air a chomharrachadh son GLPS gu lèir airson an sgeama a lìbhrigeadh seach nach biodh aig luchd-teagaisg chlasaichean fhèin ri bhith an-làthair. Gu dearbh, dh’fhaodadh an luchd-teagasg fhèin a bhith ag ionnsachadh aig an aon àm agus a’ cur ri teagasg na Gàidhlig leis an eòlas sin an dèidh clasaichean nam Fèisgoil.”

Thèid Aithisg Bhliadhnail Fèisean nan Gàidheal airson 2011-12 fhoillseachadh aig a’ Chruinneachadh Bhliadhnail anns a’ Ghearasdan Dihaoine 21mh Sultain. Tha an Aithisg a’ mìneachadh mar a tha suas gu 43,000 neach air a bhith an-lùib obair na buidhne thar na bliadhna; bha 5,922 de dh’òigridh aig na Fèisean; fhuair 3,191 buannachdan an-lùib foghlam ciùil traidiseanta tro Iomairt Chiùil na h-Òigridh ann an diofar sgìrean tro na Fèisean; bha 16,798 neach aig tachartasan fèis Blas 2011; 7,920 neach an làthair aig na tachartasan Cèilidhean air Chuairt tron Ghàidhealtachd thar samhradh 2011; tha nis 44 Fèis fo sgèith na buidhne; chaidh £299,811 a thoirt seachad le Fèisean nan Gàidheal do dh’ Fhèisean ionadail ; agus bha cosgaisean na buidnne gu lèir aig £1,408,055 airson na bliadhna.

Source: Fèisean nan Gàidheal

“The 2012 sound festival is the most adventurous to date,” says Festival Director Fiona Robertson. “sound is a showcase for performers across a wide variety of musical genres offering a vital platform for the vibrant and dynamic world of new music.”

“This year in an exciting new venture we take opera out of the concert hall and into venues as diverse as a lighthouse, a stable block, a pub and a bus, and we unveil the soundclub which will offer after hours music experiences at Musa. We are introducing a new workshop programme, soundgeneration, which offers composing and performing opportunities to young people as well as a new family events programme which this year includes projects with Red Note and Daniel’s Beard. Our 2012 residency is with NYOS Futures will see this new generation of Scottish performers presenting world premieres of works by Stephen Montague, Paul Mealor and Oliver Searle. We welcome a host of old and new friends including sound regulars Pete Stollery, Michael Popper, Ruth Wall, Richard Craig and more, and, making their sound debut Elizabeth Chojnacka and Nicola Benedetti among others.”

“Over the years Scotland has built up a strong reputation internationally for its commitment to commissioning and performing new music. sound continues to fly the flag for this important part of the nation’s cultural life ensuring that a body of new work is created for generations to come and that more people can experience the thrill of live performance.”

Out of the Box Opera Weekend (1-4 November)

At the heart the 2012 sound festival programme is a weekend of performances and events that takes opera out of the theatre and into a lighthouse, a stable, a pub, an art gallery, an urban flat, and on to a bus. The Out of the Box weekend (1 – 4 November) includes five new operas commissioned by sound from some of Scotland’s leading composers, the first performance of Sonica’s new commission from Claudia Molitor, a new community opera and a one day symposium exploring new directions for opera led by Alex Reedijk.

Acclaimed composer John Harris and award-winning author Zinnie Harris collaborate on The Garden, a new piece commissioned by sound, which will be staged in an urban flat; Pippa Murphy’s Bolted, commissioned by sound and directed by Grid Iron’s Ben Harrison, is performed at a stables; Gareth Williams’ Last One Out, a sound festival-Scottish Opera co-commission with libretto and direction by Johnny McKnight, will be presented in the Museum of Scottish Lighthouses in Fraserburgh. Claudia Molitor makes her sound festival debut with the first performance of Remember Me, her new work inspired by the desk she inherited from her grandmother. Remember Me will be staged at a desk in Aberdeen Art Gallery. In Re:Sound composer Duncan Chapman will work with individuals and community groups to create, rehearse and perform a specially commissioned opera all in one day. Meanwhile, in the Illicit Still pub in Aberdeen sound will present performances of Gareth Williams The Sloan’s Project. Based on stories collated from people who frequent Glasgow’s celebrated Sloans Bar, the piece will be performed by a cast headed by tenor, Jamie McDougall. Meanwhile, Unleashed, a late night “anti-opera about maleness” with music by Philip Venables will be staged in the Lemon Tree. Linking three performances on Saturday 3 November (The Garden, Bolted and Last One Out) an Opera Bus will tour between venues entertaining the travellers with a new piece composed specially for the trip which has been commissioned by sound from Stephen Deazley. Mathew Sharp will both sing and play the cello on the opera bus.

World Premieres

Once again sound offers a plethora of premieres. Alongside the new operas, the 2012 festival features 11 other World Premieres including a sound festival commission from Robert Saxton, Little Suite for Organ; Stephen Montague’s Phrygian Ferment, commissioned by Elisabeth Chojnaka; Paul Mealor’s Crucifixus; Geoff Palmer’s A Caedmon Symphony and David Matthew’s Romanza, for which acclaimed violinist, Madeleine Mitchell will be joined by pianist Nick Clayton. Pieces by Oliver Searle, Huw Watkins, Ross Whyte, John McLeod and Moritz Eggert will also get their World Premiere along with a specially commissioned piece from Marc Victoria Garcia, winner of the 2011 Aberdeen Music Prize, which will be performed by the BBCSSO in a concert that also sees Nicola Benedetti’s sound debut.

Red Note at sound

Red Note have become synonymous with sound from their first ever performance in 2009 to last year’s hugely successful Noisy Night and 1000 Airplanes. This year they return with a rich and diverse programme at the Woodend Barn in Banchory. Kicking off with a Noisy Night on 26 October, they will then lead a workshop and give a family concert featuring Sally Beamish’s delightful work The Intoxicating Rose Garden on the morning of 17 November. That evening they will be joined by the celebrated dancer, Michael Popper, and Iranian Setar player, Anoosh Jahanshahi, for a full performance of The Intoxicating Rose Garden with animated images of Hafez poems, which Beamish has set to music in this piece, created by Jill Peacock.

Three Cities and soundsites

2012 sees the culmination of first stage of the Three Cities project, which has brought together participants from Aberdeen, Bergen and St Petersburg to create unique sound pictures of these three northern cities. The finale will be presented in the stunning new library building at Aberdeen University. Meanwhile, launching at sound 2012 is soundsites a new project commissioned by Aberdeen Council from composer Pete Stollery. Using an internet-based interactive sound map people will be able to document and share places in and around Aberdeen. The first sound recordings will be made for the map during sound.

Hills, harp, harpsichord and more

Composer Matilda Brown has a deep love of the hills. For the 2012 sound Festival she will present an exhibition including original photos by Nick Rawle, projections, music and song all inspired by landscape, staying in bothies and camping in the Highlands. For those who share her love of the great outdoors and want to compose their own response there is also a rare opportunity to join Matilda on a three day event which will include a day out on the mountains around Glen Muick with a visit to Shielen of Mark bothy, a day workshopping a musical response to the experience with a professional ensemble and a performance in Ballater.

Scottish harpist Ruth Wall makes a welcome return to sound this year with a programme ranging from the spiritual to the sultry. Playing three different instruments (Celtic, Renaissance and Scottish Lever harp) Ruth will perform works by Arvo Part, Steve Reich, Graham Fitkin and Astor Piazzolla amongst others.

The harpsichord is inextricably linked with the baroque period, but sound 2012 will show how the instrument is as adept for the 21st as the 17th and 18th centuries. Joined by the strings and percussion of NYOS Futures Chonjnaka will showcase her formidable keyboard skills in Stephen Montague’s Phygian Ferment, a piece which she commissioned. NYOS Futures will also join forces with NYCOS for the world Premiere of Paul Mealor’s new work Crucifixus and give a concert of work with the astonishing flautist, Richard Craig, which will feature the World Premiere of Oliver Searle’s Close to Shore for contrabass flute.

Other performers bringing new and exciting work to sound this year include Tommy Smith whose “Karma” programme sees the acclaimed saxophonist exploring sounds and textures that evoke Irish, Scottish, Japanese and Arabic folk influences; pianist and composer Rolf Hind; the renowned Kungsbacka Trio, who will give the World Premiere of a new work by Huw Watkins; guitarist Simon Thacker whose programmes will include music from JS Bach to Nigel Osborne, Terry Riley and India’s greatest composer Shirish Korde; and the Matthew Herbert Quintet whose visceral One Pig is the story in sound of the life of an anonymous porker from its first squeals to its inevitable end in the abattoir.

Events and activities for young people and families

sound has always offered programmes of events for the family and this year is no exception. As well as the Red Note workshop and concert at Woodend Barn the 2012 festival will see a second Go Compose project for young composers aged 13 – 18; What’s the Score, a weekend workshop for 12-18 year olds who would like to learn to write music for film or TV; composition and improvisation workshops; and Daniel’s Beard’s Music and Nonsense. The celebrated ensemble will work with local primary children on music based on Edward Lear’s Nonsense Poems and then give three family concerts with performances of Lenny Sayer’s Jabberwocky, The Owl and Pussycat and more; Chris Hutchings Actaeon and Diana and the pieces composed in the children’s workshops.

Tickets for all sound Festival events available from Aberdeen Box Office.

In person at the Music Hall or His Majesty’s Theatre: 9.30am – 6pm Mon- Sat or at The Lemon Tree 11.30am – 2.30pm Fri – Sun.

By telephone on 01224 641122, 9.30am – 6pm Mon – Sat and online at www.aberdeenboxoffice.com

For full details of the 2012 sound festival on www.sound-scotland.co.uk

and join sound on Facebook

Source: Sound Festival

Always a show-stopper, this year’s offering at the Highland’s premier Gaelic event was no exception, with the award-winning Battlefield Band, the Highlands’ own bowing stars Blazin’ Fiddles and the jaw dropping talent that is Fèis Rois delighting a packed audience. A highlight was the appearance of the cast of the beautiful Blas 2012 commission from Margaret Stewart, “A’ Bhanais Ghàidhealach – The Highland Wedding”, acclaimed for all its performances from the opening night at Aigas on Friday 7 September. The Highland Wedding of the year, the special commission which launched the Blas 2012 festival, captured the imagination and led the way for a triumphant week of audience pleasing events.

Blas organisers, building on the outstanding success of the 2011 event, this year attracted new sponsorship from RBS, Business Gateway and West Highland College to enable them to build a successful the platform for this year’s festival. The event was also supported by pubic-sector bodies Creative Scotland, Bòrd na Gàidhlig, Highlands & Islands Enterprise and The Highland Council, which has consistently supported the festival’s growth.

Blas 2012 Director Donna Macrae said: “It’s been a blast at Blas, as ever. We have had a fantastic mix of talent from all parts of the globe but, as always, a special focus on the very best of Highland music and song. For all the challenges we face in terms of the current financial constraints, we have managed to pull off another remarkable week which has, on the evidence of our audiences, been a resounding success. Arthur Cormack and his staff and contributors from the Fèisean nan Gàidheal network have kept the machine well-oiled over the years and this year they have once again excelled themselves with their contribution. Throughout the Highlands we have entertained everyone with a great series of events and to see the reception we got at the closing concert in Inverness makes it all worthwhile.”

Donna Macrae added: “One of the most significant votes of approval we receive is the clamour to have some of our performances repeated elsewhere. I have no doubt but that “The Highland Wedding” and “Eilean Fraoich” – the tribute to Calum Kennedy may well be reprised at some point in the future and no-one can ask for any better. And that’s another series of major performances the young Fèis stars have under their belts as they set off on their musical careers. Perhaps that is the most satisfying aspect of Blas 2012.”

Arthur Cormack, Chief Executive of Fèisean nan Gàidheal paid tribute to all those involved in Blas 2012. He said: “We had a great bunch of artists, on the ball promoters at local level, a great team at Donna Macrae’s office and very enthusiastic audiences. We also hit our box office targets, which we have done almost every year since Blas began. But the nature of the festival is such that it will always require a level of external investment if we are to be able to bring good quality events to small venues. We are extremely grateful to all those bodies that continue to help us financially, even in these tough times. There is, of course, an economic benefit from Blas which gives employment to musicians, income to accommodation and food providers and to other areas of the creative industries. But the greater benefit is the opportunity to celebrate Gaelic culture and promote the language.”

Plans are already underway for Blas 2013 which will take place from 6 to 14 September. Among other events it is hoped to that there will be an appearance from one of Scotland’s foremost bands marking a significant anniversary next year.

Blas 2012 a’ coimhead chun na h-ath bhliadhn’ mar tha

Thàinig an t-ochdamh Fèis Blas gu crìch an Inbhir Nis air an deireadh sheachdain le cuirm shònraichte ann an Talla an Aodainn a chuir crioch air sia latha de chuirmean air leth air feadh na sgìre. Agus ‘s gann gu bheil an doras sin air dùnadh na tha sealladh air adhart bhon stairsnich gu 2013.

Tha e na chleachdadh a nis aig Fèisean Blas gu bheil a’ chuirm-chriochnachaidh na h-oidhche air leth, agus cha robh am bliadhna air chaochladh. A-measg na ghabh chun àrd-ùrlair bha an còmhlan Battlefield, Blazin’ Fiddles agus òigridh Fèis Rois. Mur biodh sin fhèoin son air togail a thoirt do dhaoine, chaidh sealladh eile fhaighinn air luchd na bainnse, a bha fhathast a’ rèiteach cuid de na ceistean is àmghairean, spòrs is fealla-dha a bh’air fhighe steach dhan Bhanais Ghàidhealach. Eadar a h-uile gnothach eile a chaidh a chur air adhart, chaidh aithris ionmholta a dhèanamh air coimisean fèis na bliadhna seo, a chaidh a dheisealachadh leis an t-seinneadair Maighread Stiùbhart.

A’ togail air fèis na bliadhn’-uiridh, fhuair Blas 2012 taic às-ùr bho bhuidhnean goistidheachd leithid RBS, Business Gateway agus a’ Cholaiste mun Iar. Fhuair an fhèis taic cuideachd bho bhuidnean poblach leithid Alba Chruthachail, Bòrd na Gàidhlig, Iomairt na Gàidhealtachd is nan Eilan agus Comhairle na Gàidhealtachd, a tha air a bhith a’ cumail taic chun na Fèise grunn bhliadhnaichean.

Thuirt Stiùiriche Blas 2012 Donna NicRath: “Bha ceum an casan a h-uile duine aig Blas mar as àbhaist agus farum aig na bùird anns a h-uile talla. Tharraing sinn measgachadh air leth de thàlantan bho air feadh an t-saoghail, ach bha ar prìomh amas mar as àbhiast air fìor cheòl is òrain na Gàidhealtachd a chumail aig teis-mheadhain gach tachartas is àrd-ùrlar. Ged a tha cùisean air teannachadh orinn ann an iomadach dòigh thaobh staid an eaconamaidh agus gearraidhean eile, the e iongantach mar a chaidh againn air leithid de sheachdain a chruthachadh agus a lìbhrigeadh. Chan eil dearbhadh nas fheàrr againn air sin na an taic a fhuaras bhon luchd-amhairc. Cha ghabh luaidh a dhèanamh gu cothromach air Art MacCarmaig agus luchd-obrach Fèisean nan Gàidheal agus tha lìoradh nam Fèisean a-rithist air a bhith nan rionnagan ann an speuran nan ealan. Chuir sinn clàr air leth air adhart fad na seachdain agus tha mar a chaidh le gach tachartas air feadh na Gàidhealtachd, ach gu sònraichte leis a’ chuirm-chriochnachaidh na shàr thoileachas dhuinn uile.”

Bha Donna air leth moiteil as na rinneadh le cuirm no dha air an deach fèill air leth a bhuileachadh. “Chan fhaigh sinn moladh nas fheàrr an àite sam bith na daoine a bhith ag iarraidh ath-shealladh air cuirmean, agus an toirt gu àiteachan eile. Tha sin air tachairt mar tha a-thaobh na Bainnse Ghàidhealaich agus cuideachd “Eilean Fraoich” – far an robhas a’ luaidh beatha agus saoghal a’ Cheanadaich. Tha a h-uile dòchas again gun tèid dòigh a lorg airson an cur air adhart a-rithist. Agus aig deireadh an latha ‘s dòcha gur e an rud as mòtha a tha a’ toirt dhuinn de thoileachas gu bheil sinn air sruth eile de luchd-ciùil agus seinneadairean òga a leigeil ma sgaoil tro shaothair nam Fèisean. Sin a bhuannachd as mòtha a thàinig à Blas 2012.”

Rinn Ceannard Fèisean nan Gàidheal, Art MacCarmaig, moladh air a h-uile duine a bha an sàs ann am Blas 2012. Thuirt e: “Bha còmhlain, seinneadairean agus luchd-ciùil air leth againn, sgiobaidhean agus daoine aig àrd ìre anns na coimhearsnachdan a’ cur nan cuirmean air dòigh agus gam foillseachadh, sgioba air leth san oifis aig Donna NicRath agus sluagh a bha air am beò hlacadh leis na bha man coinneimh. Choilean sinn an teachd a-steach a bha a dhìth orinn, mar a tha sinn air a dhèanamh cha mhòr a h-uile bliadhna on a thòisich Blas a dh’aindeoin àmhghairean an eaconamaidh. Tha cosgais an lùib cuirmean mòra a chur air adhart ann an coimhearsnachdan beaga agus tha taic-airgid gu bhith a dhìth airson sin a dhèanamh. Tha sinn gu mòr an comain nam buidhnean maoineachaidh a tha a’ cumail taic thugainn, gu h-àraidh seach gu bheil gnothaichean gu math doirbh aig cuid dhiù iad fhèin. Tha iad ag aithneachadh gu bheil buannachdan ann dhan eaconamidh bho shaothair Blas, a tha a’ toirt obair do luchd-ciùil cho math ri teachd a-steach do thaighean- còmhnaidh agus ithe, agus do mheuran eile de na gnìomhachasan cruthachail. Ach tha a’ bhuaidh as motha a’ tighinn bho na cothroman a tha Blas a’ tairgse ar cultar a chomharrachadh agus aithneachadh, a’ cheart cho math ri bhith a’ brosnachadh agus a’ misneachadh dhaoine a-thaobh na Gàidhlig.

Thathas a-nis a’ coimhead air adhart gu Blas 2013 a bhios a’ dol air adhart bho 6 gu 14 Sultain. A-measg ghnothaichean eile, tha dùil gum bi còmhla ciùil ainmeil Albannach a’ comharrachadh ceann-latha shònraichte le bhith a’ tighinn chun na Fèise.

Source: Blas Festival

The “Wild North Festival 2012” is an exciting programme across the northern highlands to promote and celebrate the nature, culture and landscapes of our area.

“Wild North” will focus on activities to encourage visitors and local communities to enjoy and learn more about the rich heritage of the northern Highlands. All events being held during the Festival will have a direct or indirect link to nature and the rich tapestry of landscapes that make up Caithness and Sutherland.

As a pilot event, this year’s environmental Festival will be held from 28th September to 14th October and will focus on three distinct and stunning areas for nature, landscapes and culture; Assynt and the Mackay Country in Sutherland, and the north coast of Caithness, from Castletown to John O’Groats.

Mackay Country

As a taste of some of the things to come, from 28th September to the 2nd October the Wild North Festival hopes to present; guided walks in and around Durness, a local art exhibition, a local food event, Nordic walking activities, a full day of activities with Gaelic artist Déirdre ní Mhathúna working at Strathnaver Museum, music, a ceilidh, illustrated talks, mountain bike training and wood arts & crafts activities in Borgie forest, building and decorating bird and bat boxes with RSPB and Meg Telfer all across the coast, surfing tasters at Strathy and Great Yellow Bumblebees, working sheep dog and wool crafts at Portskerra

Assynt

From the 3rd to the 9th October the outline programme includes; heritage walks,

a performance and drama in Gaelic by local schoolchildren, an Arts and Craft Fair throughout the day in Lochinver, a drama about Herring Fishing (in English with Gaelic songs), A workshop on Music Through the Ages, a Ceilidh including a collection of songs of Assynt, a bushcraft and survival skills Family Event in Culag Woods, illustrated talks on whales, dolphins and porpoises and ospreys and eagles. The Assynt part of the Festival will end with a family Fun Day in Lochinver ending with Torchlight Procession, fireworks and final Ceilidh.

Castletown to John o’Groats

If you still have the stamina for more events then the final part of the Wild North Festival moves to Caithness from the 10th to the 14th October. Here there will be an exhibition of photographs/interpretive material on bees and bee-keeping, a 2 Day workshop to learn the making of outdoor films/videos with a nature theme and screening, guided coastal walks and treasure hunts at Freswick, open workshops on spinning, dying of wool, and a full day of activities from “Dawn to Dusk at Dunnet” with fishing competitions, bird song, sand art, walks and stories, surfing taster sessions and a shorewatch event around beach bonfires and on to a Night Sky event. Other Caithness events include a guided walk to the forgotten village of Badryrie, an opportunity to learn about migratory birds at St John’s Pool, Brough, an all-day event at John O’Groats including a BBQ, well known musician and teller of tales, Bob Pegg, and young artist Madeline Mackay, from Bower will help you to participate in The Big Draw.

Add to this more art exhibitions and a wild food foray and you’ll see there is a very ambitious programme to keep us all entertained across the north Highlands! And all this is just a pilot for an even bigger festival hopefully to be held in June/July 2013 to help celebrate the Year of Natural Scotland.

The Wild North Festival is being led by North Highland Initiative through a steering group made up of individuals and organisations from across Caithness and Sutherland.

David Whiteford, Chairman of North Highland Initiative, said: “We are delighted to be involved in the birth of an exciting event which celebrates the extraordinary environment of the Northern Highlands and all that it can offer. We very much hope that the festival becomes an annual must-do event in the calendar.”

For more information on the Wild North Festival contact Alexandria Patience on 07599 760798 or 01641 531355.

http://northhighlandsscotland.com/wildnorthfestival/


http://www.facebook.com/WildNorthFestival

Source: Wild North Festival

Emily Smith said: “I’m delighted to be returning to Perthshire Amber again this year, last year’s show was one of the highlights of 2011, in my opinion it’s one of the best festivals in Scotland”.

The festival will also feature the stunningly talented Julie Fowlis, the vibrant sounds of the Blazin’ Fiddles, the multi-talented ‘BBC Folk Musician of the Year 2012’ Tim Edey, the Ross Ainslie Trio and rising star Edwina Hayes all joining ‘Scotland’s Musical Hero’ Dougie MacLean on stage in different venues across Perthshire.

Festival tickets are going fast, but there is still availability for some of the festival highlights including:

Sunday 28 October The ‘Legends Concert’ featuring The Dougie MacLean Trio band and Buddy MacDonald at Pitlochry Town Hall

The ever popular Trio featuring Dougie MacLean with Greg Lawson on violin and Pete Garnett on accordion are joined by singer/ song writer Buddy MacDonald from Cape Breton, Canada

Friday 2 November Dougie MacLean with Strings and Choirs at Perth Concert Hall

A stunning concert one of the big highlights of 2011, featuring InChorus, Lothian & Borders Police Choir and Tayside Police Choir and the Perthshire Ensemble – promises to be an exciting night with some wonderful and interesting musical arrangements.

Saturday 3 November Dougie MacLean and Friends at Perth Concert Hall.

Always a fantastic night filled with fun, laughter and great music – this year the friends include Sheena Wellington, Tim Edey, Duncan Chisholm, Emily Smith, The Hazey Janes and many more.

To view the full programme for the Perthshire Amber Festival 2012, which involves 400 artists and 16 different venues, and to book tickets go to www.perthshireamber.com

Source: Perthshire Amber

FEATURING work by established local artists including Kirsty Cohen, Michael Stuart Green, Nicola MacDonnell, Christine O’Keefe, Fiona Matheson, Cyril Reed, Jessie White, Evelyn Pottie and Francis Boag, the Compare and Contrast exhibition at the Nairn Book & Arts Festival explored a range of different media within a relatively narrow spectrum of art practice.

COMPLIMENTARY to investigation of line drawing, oils, acrylics, watercolour and digital art in this year’s workshops, the exhibition succeeds in presenting some wonderful examples of work by familiar and established local artists, but without the element of discovery and burgeoning context present in previous festival years.

Landscape by Francis Boag

Cyril Reed’s Life Study ‘Lorna’ (Watercolour) utilises bare line to great effect, coupled with small blocks of watercolour wash. The range of colour from blues, earthy yellows, browns and pinks is almost a deconstructed palette of flesh tones, anchoring the drawn line resoundingly to the physical body. Although probably cropped as part of a sequence of life drawings the composite of two figures; one reclining in the top right of the composition and the other seated female figure beneath set up an interesting dynamic of contemplation between two selves.

Landscape is a central preoccupation of this show and Evelyn Pottie’s ‘Upper Findhorn and Strathdearn’ (Screenprints) display her skill and subtlety as a printmaker in a medium usually associated with boldness of Pop Art. Here it is the multi-layered hues and light of the Scottish landscape that the artist captures in painstaking tonal layers; her visual signature strikingly painterly and equally composed.

Utilising a vibrant, incandescent palette and found elements of collaged music and printed text, Francis Boag’s ‘Bergen Fjord’ (Acrylic) presents an interesting play of man-made and natural forms and an almost unreal depth of hue. Contrasting colour and texture bring this semi-abstract composition to life.

Nicola MacDonnell - Blue Windows

Nicola MacDonnell’s ‘Blue Windows’ (Watercolour & Ink) submerges the viewer completely in dreamy washes of turquoise blue, creating an immersive mood and atmosphere that like the semi-open windows with their pitch black interior, invites contemplation. In a similar way use of negative space as an engaging part of the interior design of the image is explored in ‘Ghost Trees’, where the absence of detail, the blank ground of the drawing, assumes its own meaning. Treatment of the rest of the image is almost decorative in its use of pattern and line and this tension between drawn mark and ground on both a technical and psychological level begs further development.

Michael Stuart Green - Kitchen Reflections

Michael Stuart Green’s work provided perhaps the most stimulating food for thought in the exhibition, particularly ‘Kitchen Reflections’ (Original Digital Print 1/5) which characteristically displays his accomplished cross-disciplinary technique. This fusion of drawn, painterly and digital approaches creates multi-layered possibilities of interpretation in relation to the subject. The composition is bisected by the bold acidic lemon yellow of the domestic interior, together with the text “kitchen reflections on everything we ate and when it was that we could eat together”, prompting interrogation of a seemingly passive still life. The text, written in a font akin to newsprint or advertising, together with the table in the foreground spilling into the viewer’s space as if we are also complicit, causes the viewer to re-evaluate a familiar scene. The reflections in the oven door draw our eye into the image and also beyond it; to a window reflected back within our own imaginative space. The artist has created a multi-layered print reflecting a multi-dimensional world of visual interpretation, as much about the act of seeing as it is about the subject.

While funding cuts have no doubt had an effect on the scale and ambition of Visual Arts content of the festival, from a curatorial standpoint bringing together diverse practice from artists at all stages of their careers is arguably more dependent on vision than budget. With the Open Competition element from previous years and links with emerging artists from Scotland’s Art Colleges absent, even with Scotland’s fifth Art College in Elgin on the doorstep, professional context and creative trajectory have been subsumed by a selection of conservatively pleasing work.

It was great to see in an adjacent room to the main exhibition, a display by pupils of Nairn Academy Art & Design Department. However this also caused me to wonder if looking around them locally these students would be able to see a career trajectory visibly in evidence, with the work of established local artists of different disciplines across the spectrum represented and celebrated publicly in a way that wasn’t necessarily married to market perception. Unfortunately, the answer even at festival time would still appear to be no.

The voluntary sector does an enormous amount of work in support of Visual Arts throughout the Highlands and Islands and this is of huge importance and value in communities right throughout the region. The Nairn Book and Arts Festival is a great example of this vital activity; however with a distinct lack of representation and public development of Visual Arts locally there is also an opportunity to link this community grounded activity with a wider professional and educational context. Contact with established artists leading workshops during the festival is certainly one way of doing this and no doubt of great benefit to participants, but there is also a wider question of making Visual Art visible that has yet to be fully addressed in our region. What role festival committees have to play in this bigger picture is an issue for further consideration and debate.

© Georgina Coburn, 2012

Links

• Nairn Book aad Arts Festival

www.nairnfestival.co.uk

EVEN looking across its younger generational stratum, today’s folk scene often still appears a largely male-dominated realm, so the affirmative action embodied by the main touring double bill of this year’s Blas festival, joined here by young North Uist singer Linda Macleod, serves as a welcome counterweight.

ALL three acts – performing against the always enjoyable backdrop of evening flights taxi-ing into the arrivals terminal – had self-evidently been chosen first and foremost on the basis of outstanding musical merit, together with the complementary qualities of their music, factors which of course only strengthen the feminist subtext.

Vamm

Still in her early 20s, MacLeod is a justly rising star of Gaelic song, combining deep local and family roots in its traditions – especially through her late grandfather, Hugh Matheson, one of whose songs she included here – with extensive academic studies at Glasgow University, where she specialised in previously unpublished material from her home community of Baleshare, and now works for the Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic. Not that there was anything remotely dry or scholarly about the two short sets with which she opened both halves of the show, just the natural assurance and expressive eloquence that comes from knowing and loving your stuff to bone-deep level, allied with a dulcet, delicate, yet subtly wiry voice and sure rhythmic instincts.

Vamm, meaning to bewitch or enchant in Shetland dialect, is the new trio partnership between those islands’ leading female fiddler, Catriona Macdonald (formerly of Blazin’ Fiddles), her Perthshire co-instrumentalist Patsy Reid (formerly of Breabach) and Marit Fält – from Norway, of Swedish parentage – on Låtmandola, an octave mandolin with an additional bass string and “various other extras”.

It’s barely a year since they launched the band, and their sound still resonates with the fresh delight of discovery, but in all other respects this is already richly-evolved, sumptuously sophisticated music, fuelled by a shared passion and exquisite discernment for beautiful tunes, drawn from across the full swathe of their collective heritage. Also capitalising fully on a formidable shared armoury of technical skills and individual approaches, they arrayed and reconfigured each piece this way and that, layering myriad harmonic, rhythmic and textural variations into radiantly protean sonic tapestries, encompassing moods and modes from lush classical elegance to funked-up high-speed dance medleys.

For another fiddle-fronted band, Kristan Harvey and the Sanna – the four-piece led by 2011’s Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year – could hardly have presented a more rewarding contrast. With the Orkney-born Harvey flanked by guitarist Tia Files, Megan Henderson on piano and the night’s token male, Adam Brown, on bodhran, their mostly uptempo set was resolutely anchored in chunky, springy rhythm work, enriched by Henderson’s melodic contributions and Files’s jazzy chord colours. This provided the perfect sparring-partner for Harvey’s brilliantly livewire playing – nimble yet muscular, effervescent yet exact – in a Scottish/Orcadian-centred tune selection vibrantly infused with bluegrass influences.

© Sue Wilson, 2012

Links

• Blas Festival

Cuairt nam Bàrd is a long-standing exchange between Scotland and Ireland and Fèisean nan Gàidheal recently took over its organisation from Comhairle nan Leabhraichean.

Arthur Cormack, Chief Executive of Fèisean nan Gàidheal, said: “Cuairt nam Bàrd, or Turas na bhFhilí, is a long-established cultural events featuring writers, musicians and singers from both sides of Sruth na Maoile and we are delighted to have been able to include the Scottish leg of the exchange in this year’s Blas festival. There brings a great line-up of poets, storytellers, singers and musicians as a very welcome addition to the festival programme.”

Brìd is now a full-time writer, having taught languages previously. She has won several awards for her poetry, and also for her prose when her M. Litt thesis was published. Ciarán is a professor of language, literature and civilization in St Patrick’s College Drumcondra, Dublin, and with many publications to his name in the field of poetry, novels and academic works. Caoimhín is studying for an MA in Irish at Cork, and was TG4’s Young Musician of the Year in 2012. Naisrín is a medical doctor, and the daughter of Treasa Ni Cheannabháin and native Egyptian Dr Saber Elsafty. Naisrín has won many competitions for seann-nòs singing and has appeared on several albums.

Scottish-based poets and musicians will include Calum MacLeod (Inverness), Peter MacKay and Rody Gorman (Sabhal Mòr Ostaig), Tarmod MacLeòid (Leòdhas), Lisa MacDonald (Ullapool), and Ronnie Campbell (Roy Bridge), with music from such Highlandluminaries as Rona Lightfoot, Angus Nicolson, Roddy-John “Rodaigean” Martin, Iain-Gordon MacFarlane and Sgoil-chiùil Loch Abar.

Cuairt nam Bàrd will visit the following venues:

Tuesday 11 September – MacLean Room in Eden Court Theatre @ 7.30pm [01463 234234]

Wednesday 12 September – Talla Dhonaidh Chaimbeil in Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Sleat @ 7.30pm [01471 888000]

Thursday 13 September – Clan MacQuarrie Centre in Borve, Lewis @ 7.30pm [01851 850397]

Friday 14 September – The Ceilidh Place, Ullapool @ 8.30pm [01854 612103]

Saturday 15 September – Roy Bridge Memorial Hall @ 7.30pm [01397 712371]

For more information about the full programme of events visit www.blas-festival.com

Èirinneach agus Albannaich còmhla aig Blas 2012

Fhad sa tha fèis Blas 2012 a’ dol air adhart am bliadhna, bidh Cuairt nam Bàrd, le taic bho Cholmcille, air fhilleadh dhan phrògram – cliar air a’ chlàr mar gum biodh. Bidh na Bàird Èireannach Bríd Ní Mhóráin agus Ciarán Ó Coigligh còmhla ris an t-seinneadair seann-nòs Naisrín Elsafty agus am pìobaire Caoimhín Ó Fearghail, agus sgrìobhaichean is luchd-ciùil à Alba a’ tadhal air Inbhir Nis, Slèite, Borgh (Leòdhas), Ulapul agus Drochaid Ruaidh.

Tha dlùth-cheangal agus co-luadar làidir air a bhith eadar Alba agus Èireann fad ghrunn bhliadhnaichean tro Chuairt nam Bàrd agus tha e nis air a fhrithealadh le Fèisean nan Gàidheal, a th’air a’ chùis a ghabhail os làimh bho Chomhairle nan Leabhraichean.

Thuirt Art MacCarmaig, Stiùiriche Fèisean nan Gàidheal: “Tha inbhe agus seasamh aig Cuairt nam Bàrd, no Turas na bhFhilí, air a bheil e airidh agus tha an Turas gu math soirbheachail ann a bhith a’ cur air adhart sgrìobhaichean, luchd-ciùil agus seinneadairean bhon dà thaobh de Shruth na Maoile. Tha sinn air leth toilichte gun d’ fhuair sinn cothrom meur na h-Alba dhen cho-luadar a thoirt a-steach gu Fèis Blas 2012. Tha a’ Chuairt a’ cur gu mòr ris a’ chlàr de thachartsan a tha sinn a’ tairgse, le bàird, sgeulaichean, seinneadairean agus luchd-ciùil a’ falbh mar chliar, fad is farsaing.”

Tha Brìd a-nis na sgrìobhaiche làn-ùine an dèidh a bhith a’ teagasg chànan. Tha i air grunn dhuaisean a bhuinnig airson a cuid bàrdachd agus cuideachd airson a cuid rosg nuair a chaidh treachdas M.Litt a sgrìobh i fhoillseachadh. Tha Ciaran na Àrd-Ollamh cànan, litreachas agus sìobhaltachd ann an Colaiste an Naoimh Pàdraig an Drumcondra, am Baile Ath Cliath, agus tha e air mòran fhoillseachadh mu bhàrdachd, nobhalan agus ann an raointean acadaimigeach. Tha Caoimhín an dràsta a’ leantain ceum ann an Gaeilge ann an Corgaigh agus chaidh ainmeachadh mar neach-ciùil òg na Bliadhna le TG4 ann an 2012, a-measg dhuaisean is tachartasan soirbheachail eile. Tha Naisrín na dotair meidigeach agus is i nighean Treasa Ni Cheannabháin agus an Dr Saber Elsafty a bhoineas dhan Èiphit. Bhuinnig Naisrín grunn math dhuaisean airson seinn san t-seann-nòs agus tha i air a bhith a’ seinn air iomadach clàr.

A-measg nan sgrìobhaichean agus sgeulaichean ionadail a bhios a’ cur ris a’ chuairt tha Calum MacLeòid (Inbhir Nis), Peadar MacAoidh agus Rody Gorman (Sabhal Mòr Ostaig), Tarmod MacLeòid (Leòdhas), Lisa NicDhòmhnaill (Ulapul), agus Ronnie Caimbeul (Drochaid Ruaidh), le taic bho shàr luchd-ciùil bhon Ghàidhealtachd leithid Rona Lightfoot, Aonghas MacNeacail, Ruairidh-Iain “Rodaigean” Màrtainn, Iain-Gòrdon MacPhàrlain agus Sgoil-chiùil Loch Abar.

Bidh Cuairt nam Bàrd anns na h-àiteachan a leanas:

Dimàirt 11 Sultain – Seòmar MhicIllEain ann an Cùirt an Aodainn, Inbhir Nis @ 7.30f [01463 234234]

Diciadain 12 Sultain – Talla Dhonaidh Chaimbeil ann an Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Slète @ 7.30f [01471 888000]

Diardaoin 13 Sultain – Ionad Chlann MhicGuaire ann am Borgh, Leòdhas @ 7.30f [01851 850397]

Dihaoine 14 Sultain – Ionad a’ Chèilidh, Ulapul @ 8.30f [01854 612103]

Disathairne 15 Sultain – Talla Chuimhneachaidh an Drochaid Ruaidh @ 7.30f [01397 712371]

Airson tuilleadh fiosrachaidh mu chlàr Blas 2012 airson a’ chòrr dhen t-seachdain, faicibh www.blas-festival.com

Source: Blas Festival

THIS year’s Blas Festival commission was handed to Lewis-born, Nairn-based Gaelic singer, Margaret Stewart.

FOR the last few years, she has been closely involved with the Tobar an Dualchais project as Gaelic Song specialist, resulting in a wealth of riches to draw on. Taking the theme of wedding traditions of the Highlands and Islands, she has created a feast of glorious singing and top notch music linked by gently informative narration and seasoned with the earthy humour that is the wellspring of Gaeldom.

Margaret Stewart (photo Euphoria Photography)

The earthiness was, it must be said, often supplied by the musicians, chiefly Allan Henderson, abetted by his fellow Blazin’ Fiddler Iain MacFarlane, Ingrid Henderson on clarsach, and piper Angus Nicholson. Cows were the chief catalyst, representing the major part of a bride’s dowry in the days when dowries were an integral part of a marriage.

But to begin at the beginning – the stage was set with a gentle lullaby, a song which lulls a baby boy to sleep telling him how, when he grows up and gets married, all the nobility of Gaeldom will dance at his wedding; followed by a sprightly song about lads going a-courting. This leads to an idiosyncratically Gaelic custom, ‘night visiting’, evoked by some tunes from the MacInnes Collection, a challenging volume of piping tunes where every sequence has a different variation, and there did indeed seem to be a noticeable air of concentration on the musicians’ faces.

Longing and Yearning was the next section, that stage in a relationship which leads to the proposal of marriage. Margaret Stewart’s a capella rendition of the answer to the proposal led into a pibroch by and duet with Angus Nicholson, the high point of the evening for this reviewer as her exquisite, pure silver tones mingled perfectly with the pipes. A set, it turns out, which were made specifically to match her voice – a practice which could be more widespread. It was fabulously good to hear.

An Cordadh – the dowry agreement – was historically expressed in the number of cattle the bride brought with her, and led to A’Reiteach (the betrothal) which was an occasion for considerable celebration. Each section of the evening was illustrated with projected images and for this Stewart had chosen a David Wilkie painting. As the musicians played a Cape Breton wedding reel, the figures almost seemed to be dancing along with it…

The second half opened with Stewart, solo, singing Salm XVI, the Royal Wedding psalm, in the Lewis style, a coup de theatre which was very moving in its simplicity, but as we moved on to ‘Clach a Phosach’ (the marriage stone) things were swiftly brought down to earth by a risque but very funny joke, featuring some of those dowry cows, from Allan Henderson… and so on to the actual wedding celebrations, and the wedding night itself, evoked by a charming video, nicely directed by Stewart. The evening finished with some tunes for ‘A Bhanais Taigh’, the second day of celebrations, traditionally held at the groom’s house.

As well as scouring the archives for suitable tunes, and unearthing many lovely treasures, Stewart had written several herself which more than stood comparison with them, and will hopefully encourage her not to hide that particular light under a bushel in future. An evening full of delights and surprises to begin Blas 2012.

© Jennie Macfie, 2012

Links

• Blas Festival
• Jennie Macfie

The 2012 festival’s annual commission was awarded to Margaret and her ensemble and they were tasked with delivering four performances which would be highlighted in the festival programme. The Highland Wedding was the theme chosen by Margaret, who is currently Musician in Residence at the Gaelic College, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, on Skye.

Drawing on her extensive expertise as a Gaelic singer and collector, Margaret has chosen to explore various themes connected with the place of the Highland wedding in local society through the ages. Drawing on her knowledge of Gaelic music and song, particularly through her familiarity with the Tobar an Dualchais project, Margaret has assembled a multi-talented group of musicians who will help her explore love, loss and disappointment, flirtation, wooing, night-visiting, humour and dance.

The wedding will be consummated (for want of a better word) on the opening night of the 2012 festival at the unique location of Magnus House at the Aigas Field Centre hosted by Sir John and Lucy Lister-Kaye, owners of the nature centre.

Joining Margaret will be some of the best of the Highland’s musical talent: Iain MacFarlane on fiddle and box, Ingrid Henderson (clàrsach), Allan Henderson (fiddle and piano), and Angus Nicolson on the pipes.

Donna MacRae, Blas Director said: “It is now firmly established as one of the Blas traditions that we have an outstanding piece of work to launch the event and to set the tone. I am absolutely certain that Margaret Stewart and her musicians will provide us with another outstanding start to the Festival; for all that the preparations for this Highland wedding, as with any other, will be frenetic until the last minute. Not only will the wedding itself be memorable, but the location for our opening night could not be more spectacular and we are delighted that Sir John and Lady Lucy will be our hosts. Luckily for them, it’s a wedding they won’t have to pay for!”

As long as the marriage survives the opening night, its further consummation will continue in true Highland style (the best Highland weddings lasted more than one evening) and will go on tour to a number of other locations: Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on Skye, Saturday, September 8; Poolewe Village Hall on Monday, September 10 and finally Nairn Community Centre on Tuesday, September 11, with all the performances starting at 7.30pm.

Further information on the Blas programme is available from www.blas-festival.com.

A’ Bhanais Ghàidhealach ga rèiteach

Do neach sam bith a tha air a bhith a’ deisealachaadh suidheachadh bainnse, tha fhios gur iad na ceithir seachdainnean mu dheireadh an fheadhainn as frionnasaiche. Agus sin far a bheil an seinneadair Maighread Stiùbhart agus a cuideachd an dràsta agus iad gan cur fhèin ann an sunnd airson na Bainnse Ghàidhealaich aig Fèis Bhlas 2012.

Chaidh comisean sònraichte na bliadhna seo de ceithear cuirmean ciùil a bhuileachadh air an t-seinneadair Gàidhlig, Maighread Stiùbhart, a’ tha air mhuinntireas an-dràsta aig Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, mar ‘Ceòladair na Colaiste’. Thagh i ‘A’ Bhanais Ghaidhealach’, tre na linntean, mar chuspair.

Thèid toradh a cuid obrach obrach fhoillseachadh mar phrìomh thachartas Blas na bliadhna seo air a’ chiad oidhche dhen Fhèis, Dihaoine 7 Sultain, ann an suidheachadh fìor eireachdail, Taigh Mhànuis, Ionad Nàdair Èigeis, faisg air a’ Mhanachain. Thèid fàilte a chur air luchd na bainnse aig an ionad le Sir John agus Lucy Lister-Kaye, leis a bheil an t-ionad nàdair.

Ann a bhith a’ rèiteach na bainnse, bidh Maighread a’ cleachdadh an eòlais a’ th’aice air a cuid cultar, agus an stòras de dh’òrain agus ceòl air an robh i ‘g obair cheana, na h-Eòlaiche air Òrain Gàidhlig, air pròiseact Tobar an Dualchais. Bidh an oidhche luma làn de cheòl agus òrain a’ tha ceangailte ri gaol, call agus briseadh-dùil, sùgradh, suiridhe, caithris na h-oidhch’, àbhachdas agus danns’.

Bidh cuid den luchd-ciùil as ainmeile air a’ Ghàidhealtachd còmhla ri Maighread; Iain MacPhàrlain (fidheal agus bocsa-ciùil), Ingrid NicEanruig (clarsach), Ailean MacEanruig (meur-chlàr agus fidheal), Aonghas MacNeacail (a’ phìob Ghaidhealach agus a’ phìob-bheag). Ma bha rèiteach riamh ri dhèanamh air banais, bidh Màiread air obair latha a thòiseachadh mas cuir i ceann is casan air an fheadhain sin.

Thuirt Donna NicRath, Stiùiriche na Fèise: “Tha e na chleachdadh aig Blas a nis a bhith a’ cur chùisean air bhog le sàr oidhcheanan ciùil air am fasdadh tro choimisean. Tha mi dhen bharail gum bi Maighread agus a cuideachd air a cheart ìre de dh’àbhachdas agus toileachas a thabhann dhuinn sa thachair aig Fèisean roimhe seo mas bi a’ Bhanais deiseil air oidhche an fhosglaidh am bliadhna. Tha àite air leth aig a’ Bhanais a-measg nan Gàidheal agus tha mi cinnteach gur e deagh phòsadh a bhios ann eadar a bhith an cuideachd an luchd-ciùil as ainmeile agus aig a bheil uidhir de thàlantan, agus a bhith ann an suidheachadh cho buileach àraid ris an ionad nàdair. ‘S iongantach gu robh banais ann a bha riamh coltach ri seo.”

Fhad sa sheasas am pòsadh seachad air a chiad oidhche, (agus bidh sinn beò san dòchas), bidh a’ Bhanais Ghàidhealach a’ dol air thuras feadh na Gàidhealtachd gu Slèite (Sabhal Mòr Ostaig) Disathairne 09 Sultain, Poll Iù oidhche Luain (10mh) agus an uairsin a dh’Inbhir Narann, anns an ionad choimhearsnachd Dimairt an 11mh.

Tuilleadh fiosrachaidh mu phrògram Bhlas bho www.blas-festival.com.

Source: Blas Festival