Music, Northern Streams, Grassmarket Centre, Edinburgh
Rob Adams THREE STARS
The Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland has established a strong record in bringing accomplished young talents from across the North Sea to appear at its annual Northern Streams event and the latest edition continued this trend while also giving a platform, on its opening night, to someone whose demeanour was more that of an enthusiastic hobbyist.
Archaeologist Simon Chadwick's storytelling set stitched together handy abridgements of the events and years leading up to the Battle of Bannockburn with a little help from the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. With musical illustrations including a quietly intoned hymn to St Magnus, tunes pecked out gently on a harp and others more roughly scraped from a bowed lyre, it wasn't an entirely convincing presentation.
Swedish-Danish trio Fjärin, on the other hand, exuded musicality as they delivered dance tunes and other compositions that were all of their own making but had roots in their individual traditions, delighting in entertainingly off-hand introductions that added fun to their instrumental mastery.
Former students of the Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, they wear their formal training lightly and achieve a superb balance between composition and spontaneity in a dynamic intertwining of Søren Stensby Hansen's fiddle, Kasper Ejlerskov Leonhardt's guitar and Johannes Vaht's double bass. Hansen's dedication to a romantic trip to Paris that didn't have the hoped-for long-term result caught both romance and a certain angst, but with a smile on its face, and Vaht's boyishly bashful singing of a song translated from Norwegian added another dimension to a set that packed a lot of character and charm into an hour or so that passed faster than the clock suggested.
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