Gig review: Songs of Ice and Fire, Edinburgh Pleasance Cabaret Bar

The opening concert of this year’s ninth Northern Streams festival, Edinburgh’s springtime celebration of Nordic folk music and its Caledonian kinship, run by the local branch of Scotland’s Traditional Music and Song Association, was an unpredictable mix of substantially hard going and occasional heady delights.

A three-act bill opened with the Icelandic/English duo of Bára Grímsdóttir and Chris Foster, jointly known as Funi, which translates as “fire”, an element conspicuously lacking their performance. With the best will in the world they came across as semi-professional hobby musicians, who’d perhaps become autodidact specialists in Icelandic traditional song as an early-retirement project – one that extended to the revival and reconstruction of several previously extinct accompanying instruments. While both were proficient if largely expressionless singers, with an hour-long set they considerably outstayed their welcome. After which the sparkling Swedish a cappella pairing of Karin Ericsson Back and Maria Misgeld were a total tonic for the troops, their voices entwining, echoing, overlapping and enchanting in variously honeyed, piquant and always vivacious harmony.

The final twosome of Norwegian dialect singer Kim André Rysstad and singer/Hardanger fiddler Lajla Buer Storli, fell somewhere between these two extremes, at times starkly compelling and intensely atmospheric, elsewhere montonously austere.

Rating: ***