Tradfest: For the Love of Trees, Edinburgh review: 'timely laments'

Tradfest: For the Love of Trees, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

Harpist and singer Mary Macmaster’s commission for Edinburgh’s Tradfest was inspired by trees, as “lungs of the earth”, and by our recent realisation of their astonishing interconnectedness. As an arboreal celebration, it also had its timely laments, marking Storm Éowyn’s splintering of Edinburgh’s tallest tree and the current trial of the vandals who downed the much-loved sycamore on Hadrian’s Wall.

Macmaster, largely playing electroharp, led a sextet with daughter Amy MacDougall sharing vocals, drummer Donald Hay, cellist Pete Harvey, Ciarán Ryan on guitar, fiddle and banjo and accordionist-piper Mairearad Green.

For the Love of Trees | Christina Webber / Courtesy of Tradfest

It was Green’s solo Highland pipes, however, which opened the set with the solemn, stately ground of the piobaireachd Cumha Craobh nan Teud – the Lament for the Tree of Strings (an old Gaelic name for the clarsach).

Other numbers, performed to an atmospheric backdrop of forest images and recorded birdsong, included The Cedar Silent, Jerry O’Regan’s salute to the landmark Himalayan cedar in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden, badly damaged by January’s storm, Ryan’s banjo adding mettle as the harp rippled over a drumbeat. The lyrics could have come over a bit more clearly – likewise with Sycamore Gap, a rocked-up number deprecating that Hadrian’s Wall senselessness.

The winsome melody of Liz Carroll’s Island of Woods intensified with wordless vocals from MacDougall and an earthy beat, while the penultimate number reprised that lament for the tree of strings, opening with the glittering wire strings of the clarsach, fiddle joining over a bass drone in what could be taken for an eloquent reminder of current environmental fragility.

Trees also provided a backdrop for the weirdly atmospheric opening set from Fiona Soe Paing, who was recently reviewed on these pages, her robes and imposing headgear suggesting some woodland deity.

Read more: Fiona Soe Paing, Glasgow review: 'evocative and eloquent'