Another tune from Catrin Finch I want to share with you. It’s just so stunningly beautiful. Not so long ago, I showed you the same song performed by the band Alaw and my current music crush, Gwilym Bowen Rhys. That one was a song, not an instrumental, so if you haven’t seen it before, you can check out, as well as the lyrics
Catrin Finch’s version is a harp solo arrangement of this traditional Welsh love song and it’s very creative and beautiful and relaxing and just so sooo beautiful it makes my brain melting and falling to pieces almost as much as Gwilym’s version.
Today I have an instrumental for you. Something extremely powerful, brilliant and charismatic.
I love Catrin Finch. It’s pretty easy to guess if you know that Finch is a harpist, because I love harp, any kind of harp, and I love Welsh music, and you can find plenty of Welsh inspirations in her music, because she lives in Wales. Catrin Finch is a really good and widely known harpist, just the fact that the first time I’ve heard about her was in Polish public radio, not in Welsh BBC station or online. And I naturally liked her music immediately. She’s a really good and skilled harpist and arranger. She was taught by very good harpists, like Elinor Bennett (who is actually her mother in law now) and started to learn to play harp at quite an early age, don’t know now when exactly, but as a child. Her mum is German, and her dad is English, but she is a fluent Welsh-speaker. She and her husband own a studio near Cardiff, which is actually an old chapel, and lots of great artists recorded their music there.
The piece I want to show you – “Clarach” – is a collaboration between Finch and Seckou Keita. Seckou Keita is from Senegal and he plays kora (have you ever heard about this instrument? I haven’t) and is also a drummer. Clarach, if you don’t know and are curious, is the name of te river near Aberystwyth in Wales.
