Water Music Festival presents Eliza Carthy

From 10th until 27th July the House of World Cultures presents for the first time the open-air festival WATER MUSIC: with concerts, pictures, reflections and events on everything related to the oceans and the seas. In the festival’s first edition the music program focuses on three genres: Surf music: the soundtrack to wild Californian beach life in the early 1960s. And Tiki, the artistic expression of the insatiable desire for an imaginary Polynesian paradise. And shanties, with seamen singing about their hard lives, their fascination with the sea, the gods and the dangers of life on the ocean waves. WATER MUSIC is proud to present Eliza Carthy from Great Britain. The Evening Standard is not alone in viewing her as one of the figureheads of the English Folk revival. As the daughter of folk legends Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy, she took in all there was to know about traditional music on the British Isles from the cradle on. She can play off the cuff almost every piece composed for the fiddle over the last 200 years. And this is background to her compositions, which are not at all traditional, but provocative, unusual – weird! For more information see www.hkw.de and www.myspace.com/festival_wassermusik.

>>>Thu 17.07.2008 | 20:30h Eliza Carthy (GB) A Dazzling Folk Princess
Day ticket (2 concerts + 1 film): € 10, concessions € 8 -- Two for One ticket: 2 persons together € 15 | Concessions and Two for One tickets are not available online

Lucky Berlin - Eliza Carthy is an amazing musician.

I think the above is a major exaggeration, as your context is the British Isles, in which I expect you include Ireland. Eliza Carthy is quite talented, and comes from a very rich folk music background. I myself consider both Norma Waterson a fantastic singer with a unique voice, and Martin Carthy a fantastic guitarist, who single handedly invented a style of accompanying folk songs on the guitar. They and the Waterson family as a whole have done wonderful work on behalf of English songs back, both in their interpretation of old songs, and with their own compositions.

However they have virtually no background in Irish, Scottish or Welsh music - in other words their background in Celtic music is very limited. The use of the fiddle in Celtic, and in particular Irish and Scottish folk music is far more sophisticated that in English folk music. I have not heard Eliza Carthy play any amount of Irish dance music, and I would very much doubt that she could touch the likes of the Glackin brothers, Sean Kean, Kevin Burke, Aly Bain, and hundreds of other fiddle players you will hear in sessions up and down the countryside in Ireland. I would also doubt that she would even know more than a small percentage of the dance tunes composed in Ireland and Scotland for the fiddle, let alone play them "off the cuff".

What Eliza Carthy has done wonderfully is to take the music of her parents and their peers, and used it to deliver an act that is modern, and encompasses other musical influences prevalent in the late 20th and early 21st century. I think that's the reason people should go to see her perform - there is no need to build he up to be what she is not.

A nicely balanced and fair reappraisal of the HdK hyperbole, Colin.
Have you gotten your teeth into "Dreams of Breathing Underwater" yet?
I might just tip up to Berlin myself.