EIF music reviews: Up Late with Gnoss | YOLA & Big Noise | Death of Gesualdo

Up Late with Gnoss ★★★★

The Hub

In full flight, contemporary folk quartet Gnoss are quite a sound, fiddle and flute locked together, powered by guitar and bodhran.

It was particularly impressive at this, the band’s third Festival appearance, as their usual flautist, Connor Sinclair, was temporarily absent and replaced by Tiernan Courell who stepped into the role with some panache.

The band – Orcadian founder members fiddler Graham Rorie and guitarist-singer Aidan Moodie, with regular flautist Sinclair and Craig Baxter on bodhran – enjoy a considerable following, as an enthusiastic audience reception demonstrated.

Their first set, Adelaide’s, opened with a echoing fiddle air over electronic drone that snapped into a limber jig, bodhran rattling crisply, setting the tone for other instrumentals such as the eccentrically titled reel Good Crieff, with its fiery flute and fiddle and interludes of dramatic tension, as well as an as yet untitled, skittish fiddle reel.

Moodie’s song compositions, such as The River, could be faintly pop-informed and Americana-tinged, delivered with passion, although Hamnavoe tapped into his heritage, inspired by the Orkneyinga Saga, its echoes shaded by Rorie on electric tenor guitar.

It is, however, their tune sets that really hallmark the band – and had folk dancing on the Hub’s crowded balcony. Jim Gilchrist

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YOLA & Big Noise ★★★★

Usher Hall

Family concerts can be tricky – this one was near perfect, a programme of truly inventive music. Who knew that these young players also wrote little miracles?

David Munn´s chatty introduction explained storytelling, how a chord can flirt with our moods, how a small instrument means a high note. He led us straight into de Falla´s Fire Dance, all spookery and whirling, then to an extraordinary work by young Beau Chiasson reflecting LA´s sprawl.

A hundred singers let loose in Julie Fowlis´s Touch the Sky, where we all got to na-na-na along. We heard a sweet mooching waltz by Big Noise violinist Dede Tarvey before both orchestras and a scattering of EIF´s Rising Stars combined for a terrific toreador swirl from Bizet´s Carmen.

Two alumni from each orchestra then stood to talk to us, passionate voices about how their differences are their strength, how music´s power has built their friendships.

If they surely pay attention to their colleagues, we in the audience sat inspired as Arturo Márquez´s second Danzón produced some glossy string sound, roaring brass and refined wind sounds demonstrating that the players truly play their truth. They sent us home with Beethoven 9´s big joyful message; not just good musicians, great people. Mary Miller

READ MORE: My Festival: Siobhan Wilson

Death of Gesualdo ★★★

Queen’s Hall

While no doubt brilliantly conceived in theory, Saturday morning’s performance about the life of the infamous 16th century Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Theatrical events in a concert hall only work if the audience can see what’s going on which was not the case from much of the Queen’s Hall seating. Like listening to a story with intermittent sections of the words missing, the full dramatic impact of the non-speaking actors was lost.

The visually stark stage of the hall itself, even with the usual lighting off and dimly lit, didn’t lend itself to the dark intimacy of Gesualdo’s exceptionally unusual life events. The guilt felt at murdering his wife and her lover after catching them in fragrante delicto at home in the palazzo led to the music he wrote thereafter being unlike any other then or since.

In astonishing tuning of all its weird chromaticism and a tonal blend without ever a hint of forcing it, the Gesualdo Six vocal ensemble were on stage throughout. As if unfurling page after page of his music as the events were enacted, their calming presence and sound were exquisite. Carol Main

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