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Wed 17 Jun
Bob Sumner + Sarah Jane Scouten | Auditorium
20:00 - 22:00
Doors Open 19:30
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Wed 17 Jun
Bob Sumner + Sarah Jane Scouten | Auditorium
20:00 - 22:00
Doors Open 19:30
£15.00
£0
Donald WG Lindsay and Alasdair Roberts are two unconventional masters who bring Scottish musical history and tradition to life. Together, through rare and splendid musical gems, they celebrate thirty years of music and friendship!
"Alasdair and Donald are masters of their art. Alasdair sang in a keening, often mournful tenor, playing six-string guitar with impressive dexterity and precision reminiscent sometimes of Dick Gaughan, who graced the same stage a few years ago. Donald switched between his smallpipes and 12-string guitar and sang in a darker baritone. The two guitars together producing a remarkable shimmer of notes, reminiscent of a clarsach. When the pipes joined the guitar, the ringing notes of the six-string – often capoed high up the fretboard for a lute-like tone – stood out beautifully against the warm, woody drones and gracenoted melody of the pipes. Not only the lyrics, then, but the performance too, took us back to earlier times. I found it easy to imagine music very like this being played in Tankerness or Skaill House, or even the palaces of the Stewart earls."
- Duncan MacLean in The Orcadian
Donald and Alasdair will present a programme featuring a rich variety of pipe tunes with guitar accompaniment, as well as a broad selection of songs both traditional and original. The pipe tunes bring together a diverse range of influences, from Scots fiddle tunes (Donald’s elder brother’s fiddling being an early influence), by way of Hungarian and Romanian pipe music, to classic and contemporary Highland piping and Lowland, Border and Northumbrian tunes. The songs range from variants (some rare, some more well-known) of traditional ballads or ‘muckle sangs’, to songs from the Scots lyrical tradition from the early modern period onwards, to contemporary songs written by both Alasdair and Donald.
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Open periodically throughout the week | Book online 24/7
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Daily | 10 - 4
Welcome to Birnam Arts, a boutique multi-purpose arts, conferencing and entertainment venue.
Pop in to the Foyer Cafe for breakfast, grab a delicious coffee with a selection of our homemade baking or enjoy a light lunch whilst browsing on the free WiFi. Wander upstairs to view the latest of our monthly art exhibitions before visiting the world of Beatrix Potter, or the Gift Shop to purchase a special gift for your loved ones or yourself!
We had not planned to present a hybrid festival, however that changed when one of our main authors tested positive for Covid. I greatly appreciated how the team worked with us to pivot and present remotely in part, making full use of your enhanced video conferencing equipment. As a result, we were able to deliver quite complex events with several elements all showing on screen simultaneously. The audio-visual quality was excellent, and our audiences were delighted that these events could still go ahead, in spite of Covid. The author in question was really pleased that he could join us on screen and remarked that he had not been so well supported in this way at any other festival.
Fiona Ritchie | Birnam Book Festival 2022
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The Birnam Book Festival Committee were so pleased with how the new facilities in the Auditorium added to an extremely professionally presented event. The lighting allowed us to create staging to match the country’s leading book festival events, such as we’ve seen in Edinburgh.
Fiona Ritchie | Birnam Book Festival 2022
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