A song for the Lord Provost to celebrate beginning of Hogmanay

Published on Wednesday 29 December 2010 16:33

The Lord Provost's Welcome to Edinburgh will get its first performance at the Mound tonight on "Resolution Square", the Hogmanay name for the paved precinct at the National Gallery of Scotland.

The song was commissioned from jazz pianist Brian Kellock, right, and fiddler Aidan O'Rourke. Stuart Nisbet, of Unique Events, wrote the lyrics.

"Brian's jazz structures reflects the New Town and Aidan's Celtic fiddling reflects the old," said Mr Nisbet.

"It celebrates the beginning of Hogmanay."

Napier University graduate Amy MacDougall is singing the piece, while her mother, Mary Macmaster, is playing the harp.

Edinburgh's Lord Provost, George Grubb, is a big fan of the music and hopes to make a CD to promote the city, said the Hogmanay organiser, Pete Irvine.

The line-up at Resolution Square includes Malinky, the Edinburgh-based traditional group, followed by the "Small Island Sessions" mixing Latin and "Scottish fusion" music with some "well known faces", Mr Nisbet said. It is being organised by Toby Shippey, the Salsa Celtica and Rumba Caliente front man.

The Lord Provost's

Welcome to Edinburgh

They keep you fit, these seven hills

Steep streets and skies swift as a thought…

No whisky dream, this town is real –

More than a castle in the sky,

These stairs and squares, pubs, palaces and parks,

These seven hills, those August nights,

And winter's stark reminder of the North.

If you would know the hearts and minds

That daily conquer harder climbs

Than lie between wide Forth and Pentland

Walk these streets with me

Copyright Stuart Nesbit