tones. The jigs are sweet enough too: Currants For Cakes And Raisins For Everything is a composition of the formidable box-player Anne Conroy-Burke, and Danny follows it with the fi rmly traditional Barrel Rafferty’s topped off by The Drumraney Lass. With jaunty hornpipes and a barndance to boot, there’s plenty to enjoy on this debut release from a player who may well be numbered among the greats.
Alex Monaghan
VICKI SWAN & JONNY DYER
Stones On The Ground WildGoose WGS384CD
accordion and guitar are as important as the melodies themselves. The tunes comprise Jonny’s compositions with Vicki’s Swedish- roots infl ected pieces adding to the piquancy, the swirling glee of Dancing Out contrasting nicely with the loping smallpipe duet on Valnötslångdans.
Storylines embrace the grand sweep of Nordic ballad Herr Hillebrand And Proud Lena – a truly affecting narrative where sinister forces prevail, through to the more familiar, but no less dark Lord Randall. Just as bewitching however, are more muted moments like Billy Boy and Broken Token – these are the best of songs, never frozen in time, but always fl ickering, capable of bursting into fl ame.
It’s polished, it crackles with vitality and it comes with a side serving of bass from Mark Southgate and Pete Flood’s percussion. Swan and Dyer’s previous recording announced “we’re here” to a wider world and this album continues the trend – why reinvent the wheel?!
Clive Pownceby HILARY JAMES
English Sketches Acoustic Records CDACS059
“Plenty of nyckelharpa” says the tagline on their website about this fourth release, and one wonders if it’s possible to have too much of the traditional Swedish bowed string and keyed fi ddle which Vicki Swan has done so much to bring into our consciousness? On this showing, a resounding NO has to be the answer!
Like 2009’s Glenowien, the latest collection of songs and tunes is mesmeric from start to fi nish, showing Ms Swan and partner Jonny to be amongst the fi nest duos extant. Much of the album’s charm lies in its no-messing straightforwardness, where the timbre of the nyckelharpa and smallpipes allied to
designfolk Designfolk
ltd
Building on a series of concerts at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, this recording, accurately subtitled A celebration of English landscape, weather and seasons through traditional song and new settings of poems…, is a beautifully constructed evocation of Englishness. Book-ended, as overture and doubly reprised fi nale, by Baring-Gould’s lyric to A Country Dance neatly grafted on to Simon Mayor’s A Jug For Good Measure, with an utterly captivating oboe melody line, the musical palette is broad.
There are Hilary and partner Simon’s arrangements of other traditionally sourced material (including The Bold Fisherman, the West Country Bell Ringing Song, the sinister and macabre border ballads The Two Ravens and Young Benjie, and an exquisite rendition of Beneath The Willow Tree), a piece from Gay’s
18th century Beggar’s Opera, and a sequence of new musical settings for some poetry. These include the charming and delightful Winter and Spring (from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost), Thomas Hardy’s Weathers, and A. E. Housman’s darker edged Bredon Hill.
The musical artwork richly represents the spirit and mood of the wordcraft depicting the pastoral calendar and seasonal cycle, the bucolic fi eldscape and woodscape (‘greenwood trees’ on ‘May mornings’ etc!), and the joys and woes of rural life.
Hilary’s clear, sweet and beguiling voice is the foreground to the cleverly balanced combination of Simon Mayor’s very exactly refi ned and precisely executed colour detail of strings (guitar, the customary ‘mandolinquency’ - mandolin, mandola and mandocello - and violin) with sublime use of cello (Nick Cooper) and oboe (Paul Sartin) for melodic, often arresting and haunting, detail on several tracks. There is also some bass backing, mainly by Hilary herself, drum work (Simon Price) and occasional but important contributions from accordion (Paul Hutchinson) and pipe organ (David Pether).
Finally, praise must also go to Hilary’s appealing landscape sketch illustrations that so appropriately adorn the cover and capture the concept of the recording.
Kevin T Ward
CONTACT JOHN SLAVIN
DesignFolk ltd, 27 Portland Road Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, KA1 2BT
m. 0781 513 1116
e.
john@designfolk.com www.designfolk.com
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The Living Tradition - Page 47
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