Edinburgh Tradfest reviews: Rura & Astro Bloc | Séamus & Caoimhe
Rura in full flight provided a suitably jubliant – and loud – opening for Edinburgh’s Tradfest, writes Jim Gilchrist
Séamus & Caoimhe, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★★
Rura in full flight are a force of nature. With the flickering staccato of Steven Blake’s Highland pipes locked into Jack Smedley’s fiddle, further propelled by guitarist Adam Brown and David Foley on flute and bodhrán, they provided a suitably jubilant – and loud – opening Friday night for Edinburgh’s 11-day Tradfest.
They ranged between pedal-to-metal excursions and their penchant for the anthemic – Blake switching between keyboard and pipes – such as the elegiac In Praise of Home and the mighty Great Herdsman of Etive, the latter with echoing fiddle and flute responding to each other over thrumming guitar before the pipes sang in.
If they had audience members bopping gleefully in the standing-only venue, the support quartet had already primed them for partying. Astro Bloc’s name may suggest the cosmic, but the exuberant twin fiddles of Eryn Rae (who joined Rura for a set) and Éadaoin Ní Mhaicín, along with guitarist Gillie O’Flaherty, risked remaining earthbound by the considerable ballast of Paul Jennings’s drumming.
We were treated to a distillation of the pure drop at the Traverse on Saturday by Séamus and Caoimhe, the Uí Fhlatharta siblings from the Connemara Gaeltacht, who have developed their own take on the venerable Irish sean-nós singing style.
Multi-instrumentalists, but with Caoimhe mainly on fiddle and Séamus on harp and low whistle, they generated sparkling tune sets, but the real impact was in their stunning vocal harmonies – melismatic cadences swooping or hanging in the air, as in the tender yet profoundly sad Sail Óg Rua – “Young Red-haired Sally”, the lament of Caoineadh na dTrí Mhuire, Eileanór na Rún or, in English, a version of Scarborough Fair cusped in harmonies that Simon and Garfunkel never dreamed of.
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