Catrin Finch and Aoife Ní Bhriain: Harp & fiddle duo to bring 'Irish-Welsh mash-ups' to East Neuk Festival

But the album, which the virtuosic pair will perform in Anstruther Town Hall on 28 June as part of the forthcoming East Neuk Festival, is also inspired by a little known legend that Saint Modomnoc is supposed to have brought bees to Ireland from Wales. The “w” which begins each track title reflects the “waggle dance” bees use to communicate pollen location, but the punning album title of Double You also reflects the similarities the two musicians found in their backgrounds.

Harpist and fiddler, both multiple award-winners who straddle classical and folk or world music worlds, first got together, ironically, during the Covid lockdown, when they were invited to film a Welsh-Irish collaboration for an online version of the Other Voices festival partnered between Dingle and Cardigan.

“We got together and created a few Irish-Welsh mashups, as we called them, and then it just kind of went from there,” Finch recalls from her home in Cardiff. “We got on very well; a lot of our musical direction and ideas seemed to match really well.

“We started by bringing the music of Wales and Ireland together but I guess that was just a small part of our connection, really. We’re kind of like a mirror image of each other. Our childhoods were similar in the way we both grew up with music and our devotion to practising, even down to the way our families, our parents, were round about us.”

Both have married in recent years – and both have also been through cancer. “When you’re playing together with that connection, especially something like cancer and everything that goes with that, you do have that inner empathy that manifests itself musically.”

Finch, a former royal harpist to the Prince of Wales, now King Charles, has long expanded her interests beyond classical – her album of Bach’s Goldberg Variations gleaned widespread acclaim, as has her extra-curricular ventures with the Venezuelan band Cimarrón and with the Malian kora virtuoso Seckou Keita.

Ní Bhriain‘s music also cheerfully transcends genre restraints, Lauded as a classical soloist, she grew up in a north Dublin family steeped in traditional music – her father is the renowned uilleann piper Mick O’Brien, her mother Fidelma a fiddler and teacher from a family of musicians and dancers, and Aoife has won awards for both her classical and traditional playing.

Her career path was “unavoidable”, she says, now London-based but speaking from Cork during a recording session with pianist Cormac McCarthy. “Every child on the cul de sac where I grew up played because my mother taught them. Everybody round about me played music, my aunts, my uncles, my grandfather. I started violin lessons when I was two with a classical teacher. It was crazy, but I was absolutely determined I was going to play the violin and that was that. I was a very stubborn child.”

Ask about influences and she gives a litany of old masters in which Irish trad heroes such as Tommy Potts and Willie Clancy rub shoulders with classical giants such as David Oistrakh and Arthur Grumiaux.

The legend of the bees was a revelation for Ní Bhriain. “I grew up in Ireland but I had never heard that story till I met Catrin and we started doing some research on what it meant to be Irish, what it meant to be Welsh. Then we started finding all these similarities in our upbringings, and that we had similar health scares.”

She agrees with Finch’s mirror image remark: “For the first time we both thought we’d found a musical partner where we could really be very open about what we’d been through. We understood each other extremely well from the get go.”

For full programme details visit www.eastneukfestival.com