Still officially on holiday, so I treated myself to an evening at the Globe on Friday to listen to the Duplets. They are superb harp players, doing a mixture of traditional and new music. They started with The Twa Corbies which, as they said, was a rather spooky tale about two crows eating a dead knight. There was another song about Surtsey, the Icelandic island that appeared out of the sea in 1963 as the result of a volcanic eruption. Towards the end, they played an old piece called Tree of Strings - which I have on record played by Alison Kinnaird, bought in Edinburgh in the mid 1980s (so I've had a thing about Scottish harps, or clarsachs, for a very long time).
It was a casual performance - they both kicked off their shoes while on stage and played barefoot. There were small children in the room, and at least one small dog, and people having meals - I think it's about as close as we can come today to a performance in a medieval hall!
They thanked Tom of Tom's Record Shop at the end, for getting them the gig.
They also belong to a five piece Scottish folk band called Abagail Grey, which should be worth looking out for if the harp playing is anything to go by.
They can be found at www.theduplets.com
(Sadly, I have to report that the iced coffee at the Globe isn't a patch on the iced coffee at Terra Nera on Camden Market - that was really something special).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment