Denise Grant / Courtesy of the Artist
Having finally left 2020 behind, get 2021 off to a good musical start with some brilliant fresh sounds. Fiona Ritchie has selected an hour s worth of great music from Celtic roots for you to discover including The Chair, John Doyle and cellist Ofra Harnoy.
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On The Rock (Analekta) We came here for a vacation, and it was within days that we decided to start looking for a house here and we found the perfect house, which is on a lake. I can look out and see eagles flying across the lake. Every day the weather s so different that it s like watching an ever-changing painting.
That beautiful scene in the province of Newfoundland is what inspired Ofra Harnoy s 44th recording, On the Rock. It s her second recording with her husband, multi-instrumentalist and arranger, Mike Herriott. Well, The Rock is kind of a slang or nickname for the province of Newfoundland. My husband and I actually moved here about two years ago and we came up with a list of music that we thought could be beautifully arranged to suit the cello.
Posted: Dec 28, 2020 4:51 PM NT | Last Updated: December 28, 2020
The flugelhorn and the cello aren t the most common pairing, but Mike Herriott and Ofra Harnoy say they blend well and make beautiful music together.(Mark Cumby/CBC)
In the repertoire of classical music, there aren t many duos for the cello and the flugelhorn.
But that hasn t stopped husband and wife musicians Mike Herriott and Ofra Harnoy from pairing them. They re both very vocal instruments, and I think they do blend, says Herriott. Not a lot of people would really naturally think about combining these two instruments.
But that s exactly what Herriott and Harnoy did, breaking with tradition and performing a piece by German baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann together.