Hey guys! đŸ™‚
Today I’m sharing with you a very beautiful piece from Welsh harpist Catrin Finch, whose music I’ve already shared with you a few times before, also some in collaboration with Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita. I’m sharing this particular piece with you because that’s what I woke up to today, and it was such a great feeling to listen to it somewhere between the real world and Dreamland.
Hey people! đŸ™‚
Let’s listen to some Baroque music today, in the arrangement of great Welsh harpist Catrin Finch whose music I’ve shared here a few times already. It is a part of composition by Johann Sebastian Bach, which he created for count Herman Karl von Keyserling, originally to be played on harpsichord. Interestingly, the piece was meant to cure the count’s insomnia. It was played to him by his musician, who was at the same time Bach’s student – Johann Gottlieb Goldberg – hence it’s called “Goldberg’s Variations”. I’m not particularly well acquainted with Baroque music, but I really like how this sounds onharp, and I thought we’d have a listen to the variation no. 3.
Since in the previous post I shared Changing Tides by Catrin Finch, I decided to share one more track from the same album by her (the album is called Tides). It’s also richly multiinstrumental as you can hear, but with harp having a prominent place in it. The atmosphere of this piece is very much different though. Which one do you like more? I can’t decide!
Here is another harpist – Catrin Finch from Wales – whose music I had previously shared with you, including some that she has created in collaboration with the kora player Seckou Keita. I think this is an evocative piece with interesting instrumentation, pleasant to listen to, and I hope you’ll find it enjoyable too. đŸ™‚
Hi! đŸ™‚
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.
Here it is:
Hi guys! đŸ™‚
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.
