Interview with Ruth Wall : Ockham's Razor, Kathryn Tickell and The Side, and other projects

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1 April

Harpist Ruth Wall – with compositions written for her by her husband (Graham Fitkin) – provided part of the music for Ockham’s Razor’s (@AlexOckhams') aerial-theatre show Not Until We Are Lost at The Corn Exchange, Cambridge (@CambridgeCornEx).

Sadly, although Ruth had played other gigs live, only the locally formed choir was not a pre-recorded element on this occasion. However, it was still an amazing accompaniment to hear in the space that had been made (by taking out the seating of the flat stalls), both at the dress rehearsal, and at the first performance.

On the strength of it, The Agent, having talked to Ruth (@RuthWallharp) when (as a member of the quartet The Side (@TheSideBand)) she played the first gig with Kathryn Tickell (@kathryntickell) at Childerley Hall, near Cambridge, asked her for this interview…



Q1

Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Ruth !

These questions were devised after hearing your playing (sadly not in person, but recorded) at the dress rehearsal for, and the first local performance of, the show of aerial theatre Not Until We Are Lost by Ockham's Razor (@AlexOckhams) (at The Corn Exchange in Cambridge (@CambridgeCornEx) last December).

I understand that, even when the score is performed live, there is a taped element : what does it comprise, and to what extent, and how, did you work with the composer (your husband Graham Fitkin) to determine its content ?


The show uses two harps, wire-strung and lever harp, and more than half of the tracks for the show are just solo harp, no pre-record.


I play as much as humanly possible, but, as Graham sometimes wanted the sound of more than one harp at once, we recorded the secondary lines and put them on the computer for playback. So I had in-ears [personal monitors, often custom fitted, to cut out ambient noise], with this other harp playing, so that the whole performance would be in time. It was complex, working out this element, and we used a click-track occasionally, too.


I worked closely with Graham in devising how all this could succeed, adding more lines to be played live as time went on. Graham also attended the first week of rehearsals, as the Ockhams' creative process took place later than the composition / music rehearsal, and he needed to add and change odd things.


Generally, a good fun process, though occasionally Graham shut the door on me to let me work things out alone – and also to avoid the expletives !



Q2

Please describe some of the techniques and effects employed in your part of the event, and also what challenges they can represent in live performance.


Complex counterpoint, very fast arpeggios, many harmonics, playing the red box [sound generator] with a bow and beater while also playing the harp with another hand, conducting the choir whilst playing (especially in rehearsal, and sometimes in performance), live control of the computer...

All this needed tons of practice on my own, with all the harps, red box and computer at exactly the correct height and position, as Fitkin music doesn't allow for any pauses. On top of that, the music is very tricky : rhythmically, I often play in two time-signatures at once, in different hands. It took SO much practice, and I did worry for months that I wouldn't manage it.


In performance, one last thing – I needed to watch the Ockhams', as I was synchronizing to their moves quite often.



Q3

Are there any favourite passages in the score, either because of what you are playing, or (as it has been said by the directors that it is too complicated for you to watch as you play) because of what you know that the performers are doing at the same time ?


Yes, when the Cat-flap (a massive construction of scaffold bars, which swings back and fore) is first released, the music is at its peak of complexity, and the performers are sliding down the scaffolding, or dodging the massive wall of iron bars. SCARY !


I really must NOT look then, but it is impossible not to see images flashing by, generally life-threatening images of little gymnasts flying through the air, trying to avoid this swinging wall.


Also, the first piece, for wire-strung harp, when Tina is in the Perspex tower, hidden. Amazing lighting and pacing in this, musically and visually... and, as the audience eventually discovers that there is a person hidden in the tower, there is a very special atmosphere in the room.



Q4

A few years back, you brought three types of harp that you like to play (with, of course, some of Graham's compositions for you) to a recital at Kettle'€™s Yard (@kettlesyard), in Cambridge. Congratulations on your CD, released at the end of last year, that now features three harps: what excites you most about the CD, and also the responses to it that you had ?



Thank you ! You are referring to The Three Harps of Christmas. It's an utter joy to play Graham's music – I met the music before the man, and love the complex harmonies and rhythms, as well as the wit and sensitivity, that he has employed in making these old Christmas carols new.


Each has a unique character – and the choice of harp for a specific carol is made carefully : hence, the wildly buzzing Bray harp for 'We Three Kings' – or the delicate, bell-like sound of the Gaelic wire-strung harp for 'Away in a Manger'.


To go and perform them then in beautiful historic houses, all around the UK, has been very special : the settings of Fyvie Castle, Holkham Hall, Culzean Castle, Glendurgan, etc., etc. Incredible atmospheres, and such a special tour – with Christmas decorations, candles and champers !



Q5

With this project with Ockham's Razor, you toured with the show for some time. With the group, or generally when on tour, what raises your spirits, or keeps you fresh ? (One imagines that it may be different things at different moments / in different moods ?)


I enjoy travelling on the whole, and love the chance to see new places, but I generally get excited as soon as I start playing.


The lights help, and the audience coming into the room as I play (in Ockhams' case), all get my adrenaline going. I also loved hanging out with the Ockhams' – they are a great crowd.



Q6

How much time do you spend touring nowadays, and do you have any more dates planned, playing as a member of The Side, with Kathryn Tickell ? The collaboration's first gig [reviewed here] was local – at The Long Barn at Cambridgeshire's hidden Childerley Hall – and do you have any special memories of that evening ?


I loved that first gig at Childerley – it was one of my favourites. Playing with Kathryn and The Side is amazing fun. I love the girls, and they are all such supreme musicians that being on stage with them is a wonderful experience. We will be touring more this year, and, having just finished a long, happy tour in February, I can't wait for the next outing!


At Childerley, Jocelyn and her friends looked after us so well, from the picnic in the garden, to dinner on the terrace, and then the most lovely wild party, with dancing – it was a total joy. The Long Barn is a great venue, and to see Joss and her family dancing down the aisle when we played was an incredible buzz !



Q7

Finally, what message would you give to someone coming to Not Until We Are Lost at another venue, and are there any other similar collaborations under way that you can tell us about ?


I would recommend the Ockhams' show totally, and also recommend that the audience keep wandering during the performance, not to get stuck with one viewpoint... and be prepared for some audio and visual magic !


I am working on my next show at the moment, with Graham again, a new album that we will be releasing in late summer, called LOST. The initial inspiration came from the Ockhams' music that Graham wrote for me, but, in the last year, he has transformed it, and only a couple of the original tunes remain.


The new album is for me on harps, and Graham on moog [synthesizer], autoharp, and red box. There are visuals in the live show, and it will involve video, and lighting.


The music has a mesmeric quality to it, highly intricate rhythmically, and focuses on how 'lost' we can feel in this world, including loss of faculty, understanding, memory, etc.


Thank you so much, Ruth, and I am sure that we all look forward to LOST, album and show, later in 2015, as the sensation of feeling out of place in this world is one that many are sure to find themselves relating to through the experience !

Mapping, a track from FitkinWall's new album Lost, really needs a listen (six minutes in) : https://t.co/ItvsKXdfNi pic.twitter.com/hXrjCEZ6yt

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 16, 2015

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Artist Gilly Marklew's impressions of Ockham’s Razor’s show Not Until We Are Lost at The Corn Exchange, Cambridge

Artist Gilly Marklew's impressions of Ockham’s Razor’s Not Until We Are Lost

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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18 December

Watercolourist Gilly Marklew at the dress rehearsal for Ockham’s Razor’s (@AlexOckhams’s) show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange, Not Until We Are Lost

Moonlight Sonata (© Copyright Gilly Marklew 2009)

It is a pleasure, which is ever present, to retire in contemplation of this watercolour, and to be wakeful with it after sleep :

The best art, whatever its apparent simplicity may be, one can live and grow with, because it has this quality to it that it never ceases to give as the eye explores, and re-explores, the felicities of construction and execution.

Partly, that is a question of the richness that keeps coming to the eye, but that richness is not simply in the work, but came from somewhere : Gilly Marklew has been known as a dear and gifted friend for more than half-a-dozen years, and, much as she might play down her intellectual side, her essential gifts of copying in image, word and sound, and her love of inventiveness and fun, are central to what makes her work special and alive – coupled, of course, with a strong sense of line, form, colour, and the dynamic power within a composition*.


It was a special pleasure, by invitation from the marketing team at The Corn Exchange, to bring Gilly along to the wonderland of expression that was last night’s dress rehearsal by aerial-theatre group Ockham’s Razor. In the event, she did not find herself with enough light to make use of her supply of sketching material, and the action anyway proved a little too swift for the medium, but she relished the clarity with which the subjects in the performance had been lit, and she took in image after image through her camera-lens, some of which have been shared in the original response to the evening.

Image by, courtesy of, and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

A pose and a face such as this, that of the group’s Telma Pinto in the solo opening of the show, is classic material for Gilly Marklew : the timelessness of the expression, look and gesture


Since last night, the show has been seen again, and a short discussion with cast and crew took place, and Gilly has been making sketches after the fact, using what attracted her when she saw through her lens. On this first one, she comments :

I wanted to play up the interconnected movement and love story as I saw it, [without the climbing] poles, to emphasize the aetherial.

An original sketch, by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014,

based on images taken at the dress rehearsal

The other sketch available so far is an ensemble piece, about which Gilly says This is a bit rougher, but there was more energetic movement in this scene, so it merited a more vigorous approach.

An original sketch, by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014,

based on images taken at the dress rehearsal

In some key-words, after the matinee, this Tweet sought to use language to describe how this part of the performance looked and felt :

Some words about Not Until We Are Lost from @AlexOckhams at @CambridgeCornEx : artistry / grace / energy / atmosphere / vibrancy / fragility
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 18, 2014

With her painterly perspective, here describing her artistic approach and process, Gilly uses these lovely phrases ‘vigorous approach’ and ‘interconnected / energetic movement’ : for us, those descriptions may be in the same relation as are our internal attempts to encompass, through our senses, the performers’ work in Ockham’s Razor, and to find ourselves touched and emboldened in our responses :

In the live show (as against with a smaller audience at the dress rehearsal), we had this sense of atmosphere from sharing what we felt about the different scena as they unfolded – all at once and in the moment : for they do unfold, not as origami figures might, but with the delicacy and precision that we might, say, associate with the construction and appeal of a Fabergé egg.


After the show, in response to questions about working with Graham Fitkin on his score (as beautifully performed by harpist Ruth Wall), Alex Harvey said a little about what had gone on, after they had met him, between Alex’s fellow directors Tina Koch, Charlotte (‘Lottie’) Mooney and Graham, seeking to communicate through the language of moods a conversation about the score, and helping it to take shape. Now that we have it, though unfortunately at this venue Ruth cannot be present to play live, the music feels integral to the piece...


The life of the work is in its performance, and its performance is inseparable from the immersive participation of us being there, reacting to sound and visuals (from, all the time, the actors, from Ruth, and from each other), and to the sheer drama of limbs and bodies that are flying and interacting through space and time – the actors knowing their parts and abilities so well that they are in, and simultaneously are, the vigour and interconnectedness of which Gilly speaks :

In her pastel interpretations of moments from Ockham’s Razor's Not Until We Are Lost, in finding her own relatedness to the energy and imagery, Gilly shares with us wonder and amazement that even the performers themselves seem to feel just about being alive in, and having such power of motion within, our physical world.


Artist, and Bauhaus lecturer, Paul Klee is famous, in art circles, for opening his Pedagogical Sketchbook** with this proposition (from which the work, and its teaching, develop) :

An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal.
A walk for a walk’s sake. [emphasis added]


In the second scena on the large apparatus (whose first reaction to seeing which Telma Pinto delightedly described to us as like a playground), when it becomes hinged as like a gate, we have yet another moment of discovery – it is as if another Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy (from the Narnia novels) were playing as Lucy does with Aslan (after The Stone Table), all four enjoying a game of chicken with it :

Running, as one does on a beach, towards the roarers of the ocean, and then squealingly away again, even more quickly (if possible), at a sudden appreciation of the sea’s might. All its nimbleness and experimentation – as if for the first time – caught in the hope of Graham’s score, and in the magic depicted by Ruth’s playing.


Whether evoking metallicized percussion, the picked notes of guitar, or of plucked instruments (as of a lute or thumb-piano), the boundless sound-world of Ruth and Graham's music, just as with the variety and variation of Gilly's palette, are all emblematic of the richness in Not Until We Are Lost, that we

begin to find ourselves [...], to learn the points of compass again as often as [we] awake, whether from sleep or any abstraction

[Henry Thoreau, Walden, chapter 8, 'The village']

End-notes

* As Gilly shared just on the night of the dress rehearsal, Moonlight Sonata relates to an image by Henri Cartier-Bresson that she once found and pasted into her source-book : she had seen, in his photographic image, the classicity of The Three Graces, and had – with some of her favourite sitters (not least the one placed centrally) – created her own version, looking back, beyond him, to what she thought had inspired him.

** So published in the UK by Faber & Faber Limited, London, 1953, in translation of Klee’s Bauhaus text from 1925, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Ockham's Razor at Cambridge's Corn Exchange : Not Until We Are Lost

A new show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange by aerial theatre group Ockham's Razor

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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17 December (closing Tweet added, 28 December)

Glimpses of the dress rehearsal of a new show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange (@CambridgeCornEx), by aerial theatre group Ockham’s Razor (@AlexOckhams) : Not Until We Are Lost

Nice meeting @AlexOckhams Harvey, Charlotte Mooney, Tina Koch at @CambridgeCornEx, the directors of the aerial theatre - now in occupation !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 17, 2014

Although sounding like it could quote the works of Samuel Beckettt, the title derives from Henry Thoreau’s Walden*, but no knowledge of Emerson’s or his transcendentalist thought (or of Beckettt) is necessary to an appreciation of what is to be seen and heard…

In around half-a-dozen scena, which seem to defy transparent and scaffolding materials by the forces that are exerted on them (though this is no lesson in dynamics or Newtonian principle), aerial theatre group Ockham’s Razor (@AlexOckhams) tell a series of stories – the exact meaning, though, is for us to interpret, even as it would be if we had words, rather than actions and interactions, to construe…


Afterwards, co-director Alex Harvey said that what appears before the audience is open to interpretation, and fellow directors Charlotte Mooney and Tina Koch even felt that saying that there is a choir as part of the musical accompaniment is not a give-away, so here goes :

Image by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

Some of the scena (involving all four performers (Alex plus Hamish Tjoeng, Grania Picard and Telma Pinto) on a giant scaffolding climbing-frame, which later becomes a swing) seem euphoric, even utopian, with a triumph of collective behaviour and what modern jargon calls ‘working together’, but not all of them.

One seems to revolve, more unfortunately, around the conjoined roles of Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, another that of a young woman pestered by the attentions of two similar men, who appear to be hunting her as if in a pack and to win her confidence : it all ends with seemingly innocent fun and enjoyment, but what has she been cajoled into, and for what reason ?

Image (of Telma Pinto) by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

Paper rips and tears, and the performers bodies fly between or across the face of, blunt scaffolding-poles, with no room for error, no avoiding the consequence of a mistake, and, as already alluded to, the transparent material is tested, seemingly to its limits :

Things are starting to take shape for @AlexOckhams 'Not Until We Are Lost' run at @CambridgeCornEx opening on Thurs! pic.twitter.com/7bmSCk3cig
— Turtle Key Arts (@TurtleKeyArts) December 16, 2014

It is in that medium of a clear tower, which sometimes seems more than merely a box in cross-section, that we have scope both for what seems survival of the fittest pushed to its extremes, and for the greatest elation. In the latter case, maybe a release from a – maybe Narcissistically-created – invisible prison that could be what we conveniently call 'depression', and where love, and responding when another reaches out, are part of the healing.

Image (of Alex Harvey and Telma Pinto) by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

Never pulling its punches, in the fitness of the guitar- or harp-like melodies, dissonances, arpeggios, the physicality and riskiness of the performances, and the theatrical content of the scena, Ockham’s Razor (@AlexOckhams) give more than an entertainment :

All at once, something that, by turns, can be seen as encouraging, cynical, or appalling, but always thought provoking, and never compromising with the belief in realiz[ing] where we are and the infinite extent of our relations (Thoreau*).


A follow-up piece, featuring Gilly's sketchings from her images after the event, is linked here ...


The show runs at Cambridge's Corn Exchange from 18 to 21 December.

@LindumGreene:Ockham's Razor Troupéwith Cambridge Choir Lost! I can't believe it's all over...http://t.co/gtmvKIaIQH pic.twitter.com/4aaj586SaB
— LindumGreene (@LindumGreene) December 22, 2014

End-notes

* Specifically, chapter 8 (‘The village’), where Thoreau starts by talking about being physically disoriented, and having to put one of several visitors on the right track in the dark, being guided rather by his feet than his eyes.

Following the observation It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time, Thoreau develops the thought ,with the effect of snow, and of night added to it, ending the section where the words occur, first in a different form, then as quoted (but he is clearly no longer to be read as writing just about the visual world and mistaking one’s way, any more than Canto I of Inferno) :

In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round — for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.



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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Fancy tickled : A rough cut of my delayed review of Kathryn Tickell and The Side

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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9 August

A report from the finale of this year’s Cambridge Summer Music Festival, a gig held at Childerley Hall, near Dry Drayton (Cambridgeshire), on 4 August 2013

Any event that begins with Bartók played at a suitable level over the PA system, followed by what I take for a legato performance of a rag (maybe Joplin, maybe Mayerl), promises well. This festival, which embraces not only the worlds of Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell and The Side, but also those of jazz, early music, modern composition, chamber recital, choral concerts, and the classical concerto repertoire, to name but a few, is where one would expect what is conventionally called eclecticism or variety – breadth, perhaps.

The breadth, indeed, that Kathryn Tickell herself represents, not just as an instrumentalist on Northumbrian pipes and fiddle, but also as composer, raconteuse, solo performer, arranger, teacher, vocalist, and band-leader, to name but a few of her roles or skills.

All images by kind courtesy of Reed Ingram Weir Photography

I was not wrong in writing the above : a very appreciative audience of some 500 listened to music of, indeed, breadth, and which was played with great feeling, in the beautiful venue of The Long Barn at Childerley Hall, one of the hidden secrets in the close locality of Cambridge.
Along with trio The Side (about whom more in a minute), Tickell gave a full evening’s worth of music, dancing and, above all, expressiveness – of her love of Northumbria and its people, landscape and fauna, of music, words, and other musicians, including – on stage with her – Amy Thatcher (accordionist, clog-dancer, and vocalist), Louisa Tuck (cellist), and Ruth Wall (lever-harpist).

The two-set gig ranged from a hornpipe (pipes and clogs) to Tickell’s wonderful (in its full sense) and instructive introductions, even to a Beethoven piano sonata* transposed and altered for brass quintet and then refigured further in the dance form of a strathspey, such that she hoped – in the nicest way – that there might be no trace left of the original at which she had hinted ! (Apparently, the score is saved on her PC as Beetstrath…)

Hardly surprising, though maybe he did not often go that far, that she named Percy Grainger as a leading favourite of hers, and that, with Thatcher, she had been involved in a 2009 Prom dedicated to his music – we had a taste of that night and of the collaboration as we were given first straight Grainger, and then a piece that had been reconstructed from one of his arrangements back to an idiom more akin to that of ‘Molly on the Shore’, the starting-tune.


Interlude

If Clive, one of the very genial owners of Childerley, had not spoken to me after the gig and when I was about to pursue getting the bulk of this review laid down, I would have more detail of which of the four played in what, when and what it was, but that may be lost to the mists of time… What I can say, from this visit and previous ones with the Summer Festival, is that the property is a delightful one for a picnic in the weaving – confusing, even – laid and other grounds. (There is a map, but some of us like to explore – even at the risk of getting lost.)

Thus I have seen it before, prior to the unusual experience of being in The Long Barn for jazz (big band, and also Jacqui Dankworth with smaller forces), which is very long (almost as if it had been not a barn, but a locomotive-shed), and very nicely appointed. One may need a compass and a good sense of direction to find Childerley Hall (that phrase about beaten tracks directly applies), and to go about the grounds, but it is all worth the trouble !


Back to work

As I checked after close of play, I knew that had seen Wall play before : indeed, she had had two other harps with her (at Kettle’s Yard, in Cambridge), and had played a fascinating programme (which included some pieces composed or arranged by Graham Fitkin, her husband). She told me (because I asked) that around 10% (maybe sometimes 20%) of what she had been playing was improvised (during the performance, I could see that she was moving sheets around between numbers at the base of her harp, and, without studying them, they seemed to set out the chordal structure.)

Tickell told us that she had worked with Thatcher on projects such as the Prom, plus the pair has a history of profile public music, such as a composition with delightful saxophonist Andy Sheppard for the millennium, Music for A New Crossing. Before we heard it, we were advised that this bridge is in Gateshead – and does not wobble !

All images by kind courtesy of Reed Ingram Weir Photography

Other than that she started leading the cello section of Royal Northern Sinfonia six years ago, the programme said relatively little about what Tuck has played (or where) as an orchestral or chamber soloist (but there is more here). No matter, since her playing said it all – crisply executed pizzicati, lovely resonant bass-notes, and a wholly sonorous accord in the ensemble.

Those comments, as to quality (if not to the detail), apply to all of the group : the tone of Wall’s harp had a real sparkle to it in the bright, upper range, as well as adding to the lower textures of the whole. From time to time, when there were radiant lead-notes for the harp in the harmony, I was put in mind of the musical discourse and style of The Poozies (thinking, especially, of their Infinite Blue album).

Maybe not when Wall really expected it, she was invited to take a solo, and, as with everything that we heard this night, it was met with immense enthusiasm. (In fact, when first welcomed to the stage, Tickell joked, with her typical well-judged timing, and with warm-hearted understatement, You haven’t heard us yet….)

Thatcher, one conceived, maybe could have had a chance to dazzle us more on accordion, but, of course, this was always billed as being headlined by Tickell, and, just as a matter of programming, it would actually have felt contrived to give all four a solo spot.

In fact, Thatcher almost had one (twice) on accompanied clogs, and the virtuosity that otherwise could not come so much to the fore alongside the pipes, because the reedy, shining upper part of the range would not fit so well (e.g. in the set of tunes with ‘The Wedding’), she exploited more when Tickell played violin, which she did in roughly equal measure, and with the same feeling and assurance.

Having cello and harp with their wonderful range (not least that warm, singing upper register of the former, for which so many have written with matchless beauty), as well as contributions from accordion and the drone part of the pipes, meant that there was a very full texture available, which some would call richness of sound, and this is where my point of comparison is with that of The Poozies. To my ears, everyone was also pitch perfect, and Tickell and Thatcher maintained a good tuning between numbers.

I have no doubt that many, as I was, were drawn by Tickell’s name and recordings, but, with a first outing together on stage such as this, it is important to stress what a good match for each other The Side and she are. When Tickell began the second set with two tunes, she played them with great expressiveness, with an almost keening quality in the second, drawing out the notes as if our heart-strings, and playing the music so sensuously that it felt akin to arousal.

Her skill, of course, is immense, and that is because the music, where it comes from and what it means to her are so deeply experienced, as she communicated to beautifully in her introductions, but in particular to that of ‘Yearing’ (? a title, taken from a place, that I cannot confirm), with the depiction of the morning air and the sound of the curlew.

This collaboration, with the gifted members of the trio and ranging from Thatcher’s or Tickell’s compositions to ‘Lads of Alnwick’, does not merely deserve to do well, it will do well – staid Cambridgeshire tapping its feet, whooping, and dancing in the aisles testifies to that !


Quite a number of months on, Ruth Wall had agreed to do an interview with #UCFF, where she tells us how it was for her, as a performer, being at Childerley for the first time in public in this line-up, and what she liked about this and other venues on the tour


End-notes

* The slow movement of an unspecified one. No one had the courage to guess which, although they guessed other challenges.

** As Tickell explained, they are pitch variable to accord with the key in which the chanter is being played.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)