Review: Fiddle 2011 - Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

THE 16th annual Scots Fiddle Festival saw the event relocated from Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms, but despite its enforced adaptation to three separate venues, housing a packed programme of concerts, ceilidhs and workshops, in other respects it was very much business as usual, with hundreds of fiddlers and folk fans thronging the various premises all weekend.

Saturday night’s headline concert also maintained recent years’ high standards, opening with a short but beautifully appointed set from Orkney’s Kristan Harvey, the current Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year, whose fluidly light touch and full, vibrant tone, dynamic vitality and intricately arrayed ornamentation, allied with strikingly imaginative arrangements, emphatically affirmed her rising-star reputation. Harvey’s piano accompanist, Megan Henderson, then reappeared on fiddle herself (and Gaelic song, and stepdancing) among Breabach’s recently rejigged line-up, alongside twin Highland bagpipes, flutes, whistles, guitar, bouzouki, double bass and shared lead vocals. Performing mainly new material from their forthcoming third album Bann, the five-piece were in typically tight, buoyant form, extracting optimum mileage from the multi-layered interplay among their melodic palette, and impressing once again with the overall inventiveness and close attention to detail that characterised both vocal and instrumental numbers.

Closing the show, California-based Scottish fiddle virtuoso Alasdair Fraser, in his long-time duo with cellist Natalie Haas, delivered a masterclass in joyously expansive, traditionally rooted yet thoroughly contemporary music, and in the exhilarating synergy that two such closely attuned like minds can create, their dazzling artistic prowess enriched by their evident delight in performing.

Rating: *****