Flora MacNeil 1928 - 2015

BBC obituary here, and there's a Gaelic language doc on youtube, here's part 1:

"Scotland is not for the squeamish": La Donna del Lago Encore at OperaMall Millionplex

So, let me get this straight:

There's the first guy, a complete stranger whom she invites hame tae her wee croft cuz she's leal like that, and he proceeds to get all up in her personal space the whole time he's there except when her chica Albina is ostentatiously waving a wedding veil and then resorting to the Death Ray (both utterly ineffectual due to his self-evident density supernatural yet unseen Jacobean aura).*

Then there's the second guy, her main squeeze as it happens, who finds the lady not at home, but whose default mode when she's not there is apparently to raid the liquor cabinet...question mark mark mark

Then there's the third guy, who has weird, hairy friends who like to gather on hilltops at night to tub-thump and, uh, burn crosses, yeah... I can understand her being least enthusiastic about that one. With a subset that is evidently into shrooms, interpretive dance, and woad. (Not as cool as it sounds.)

Okay, go with the second guy if you have to, at least he has the benefit of being a girl, but I have to say, given these options, the obvious choice is to blow town with chica Albina and go start a B&B in the Hebrides.

*Can we just point out that if this were another Walter Scott-based gig, say Heart of Midlothian: the Opera, her girlfriends would already be making up scurrilous traditional songs about her around the fulling table by the next scene.

You all know by now the singing was brilliant, of course it was. And since that's really all this opera is about, everything else, even King Giacomo's soulful disquisition on love in the presence of heads on pikes, is just gravy.

Thursday posting from the Ministry of Noise

Saturday night Hamish Henderson from the Ministry of Noise

"Freedom Come All Ye" performed by Karine Polwart in The Italian Chapel, Orkney August 2013. from Andy Crabb on Vimeo.

McManus, Monteverdi

and check out the frets on that Greenfield guitar

Orfeo in Shetland

Since these are the days for traffic between this place and the other. I will only point out possible causal relationship, in this version, between instrument and outcome. Also the cool linguistic fragment in the refrain, which is thought to be Norn.

via Mudcat

KING ORFEO

Der lived a king inta da aste
Scowan urla grun
Der lived a lady in der wast
Whar giorten han grun oarlac

Dis king he has a hunting gaen
He's left his Lady Isabel alane

"Oh I wis ye'd never gaen away
For at your hame is dol an wae

"For da king of Ferrie we his daert
Has pierced your lady to da hert"

Friday night Scots Gaelic waulking song from the Ministry of Noise