Gig review: Kristen Harvey and the Sanna, Inverness Airport

By SUE WILSON
Published on 11/09/2012 02:02

WITH its strapline title of “Girls Allowed”, this Blas festival line-up wasn’t quite women-only, but female performers were very firmly to the fore – as were fiddles, the chief instrument in two of the three acts.

Kristen Harvey and the Sanna

Inverness Airport

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Opening both halves of the show, however, was the unaccompanied solo voice of young Gaelic singer Linda MacLeod, specialising in songs from her native North Uist. Ranging across work songs, love lyrics, homecoming paeans and a haunting lament written from the First World War trenches, her clear, artless tones and delicate phrasing, intensified by a quiver of vibrato, wove a soft but compelling spell.

Next up were Vamm – Shetland and Perthshire fiddlers Catriona Macdonald and Patsy Reid (respectively ex of Blazin’ Fiddles and Breabach) with Marit Fält – Norwegian-born, of Swedish parents – on a customised octave mandolin, which underlaid the fiddles with everything from elegant silvery picking to dirty rock-style riffs. Macdonald and Reid meanwhile rang myriad changes on a diverse array of tunes from all three players’ home traditions, in exquisitely crafted arrangements, replete with radiant harmonies and lightly-worn virtuosity.

Kristan Harvey and the Sanna, the four-piece led on fiddle by 2011’s Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year, also included Adam Brown on bodhran, with guitarist Tia Files and Megan Henderson on piano. Harvey’s gutsy but lightsome playing was further buoyed by this dynamic backing.