Tradfest: Patsy Reid & Alice Allen/Nuala Kennedy & Eamonn O’Leary

Traverse Theatre

Patsy Reid & Alice Allen: The Strathspey Queens - 05/05/22

Nuala Kennedy & Eamonn O’Leary - 06/05/22

The cello was once a ubiquitous instrument in Scottish music. It featured in Niel Gow’s band, and many of the extensive collections of fiddle music from Gow’s era feature bass-lines intended for the cello. Alice Allen is one of a select group of cellists continuing the tradition (another, Wendy Weatherby, was in the audience for this gig). Her interest was sharpened when she discovered that the legendary fiddle showman, James Scott Skinner, wrote for and about the instrument and its role. A shared hometown of Banchory in Aberdeenshire strengthened the connection. Skinner’s music, the main focus of the evening, has been meat and drink to Patsy Reid throughout her career as a fiddler and both she and Allen demonstrated their familiarity with the old maestro’s repertoire, which can place demands on the skill of the player. Reid and Allen were well up to those demands, delivering classics such as ‘The Iron Man’, ‘The Bonnie Lass o Bon Accord’, and ‘Timour the Tartar’ with polish and verve, the cello driving the tunes along. It wasn’t all drive though. Skinner was prone to a bit of ‘tear-tae-a-gless-ee’ sentimentality, his slower tunes performed here unflashily and with genuine feeling by the duo. The tone of the evening was respectful but light-hearted, with both players admitting to an element of ‘nerdery’ (Allen’s word) in their interest. They listened extensively to Skinner’s own recordings, made on wax cylinders in the early days of recording technology, and included oddities such as ‘The Parrot’, complete with bird noises. Skinner’s tunes are a monumental presence in the canon and Patsy Reid and Alice Allen did them more than justice. 

The following night the same space, Traverse 2, hosted another duo, flautist and singer, Nuala Kennedy, once resident in Edinburgh and now in County Clare, and guitarist Eamonn O’Leary, currently based in New York. Both are well-travelled musicians, and it showed in their polish and the easy rapport they had with the audience. Kennedy is a beautiful and much under-rated singer in English and Gaelic, acknowledging and drawing on a tradition of Irish women singers, represented on this occasion by Elizabeth Cronin and Nora Cleary. O’Leary produced a soft, rich sound on what he revealed to be a borrowed guitar, his picking accurate and his chording complementing the flute tastefully and unobtrusively. A balanced programme of tunes including familiar favourites like ‘The Geese in the Bog’ and ‘The Gold Ring’, and songs both traditional and O’Leary’s own was performed with all the assurance you would expect from these seasoned road warriors. A class act.