REVIEW: CHELTENHAM FOLK FESTIVAL SUNDAY MIDDAY CONCERT: CHELTENHAM TOWN HALL

The mellow music offered up in the warmth of the main hall provided

Sunday's mid-day audience with some welcome respite from the cold and wet outside.

Old friends of the festival Grace Notes, comprising Maggie Boyle, Lynda

Hardcastle and Helen Hockenhull, opened proceedings with their beautiful

acapella harmonies on Tom Waits' The

Briar and the Rose. Next, Boyle's rich melodic flute added great poignancy

to Richard Shindell's melancholy Wisteria.

Always keen to express their social conscience in song, a precisely arranged

and sonorous rendition of the Irish Magdalen

Laundry recounted the pain of the girls consigned to spend their lives in those

institutions. They wrapped up with the rousing Mingulay Boat Song, the audience swelling the chorus of "Heel y'ho

boys, let her go, boys" to end a sadly short but nevertheless remarkable set.

Next up were The Old Fashioned, with old Cheltonian Fi

Fraser on vocals and the black-clad Pete Bullock and Howard Mitchell on piano

and double bass respectively. Theirs was a curious set, with traditional dance

tunes mixed together with macabre lullabies and gentle comedic ditties, the pick

of which were Derek Pearce's My

Reversible Fleece and Joyce Grenfell's Stately

as a Galleon.  

There were some notable things about the amazing young duo Vicki

Swan and Jonny Dyer's set. Firstly, their usually high death count was kept

down to a single casualty in the Anglo-Scottish border ballad Lord Randall, a man who has been fatally

poisoned by his lover. Secondly, they used a bewildering variety of

instruments, the most unusual of which was Swan's Swedish keyed fiddle or 'nyckelharpa'.

This was used to perfection on a pair of complex and courtly Nordic polskas. Dyer's

was probably the most impressive vocal performance of the festival, his rich

and smooth voice balancing well with a fluid and understated guitar technique,

particularly on O Madam I'll Present You.

He then added a touch of Americana with his own uplifting composition Follow Me Home before the duo finished off with a rousing acapella version of

the sailor's farewell song Health to the

Company. This had been one of the best performances of the whole festival.

It was left to the young three-piece Cupola to close the show

which they did with some dexterity. There were yet more polskas, described by

fiddle player Sarah Matthews as "a bit like a waltz with a PhD", Doug Eunson's

hurdy-gurdy hypnotically driving the dance tunes round and round. A stately Following the Old Oss fast forwarded us

to May Day and Padstow in an attempt to coax out the sun, before winding up with

a lively Jon Spiers tune The Hungry Badger's

Delight and a storming encore with double melodeon and fiddle combining potently

on The Kennington Jig and the Canadian

Mariposa.

 

Eric Worrall