Scotland Archives » Angelina Egerton

Edinburgh International Harp Festival 2015

16 April 2015 6 Comments

I’m spending four days up in Scotland this week to take part in Edinburgh’s International Harp Festival 2015 with my harp quartet CLOUDS. Today is Sunday, day one.

I took the train up from Manchester. So I’m here, with no car, and no harp – totally at the mercy of my fellow CLOUDS members to look after me – they’re doing a brilliant job so far I must say.

It was awesome having some alone time on the train, time to read my book, time to stare out of the window, time to get very annoyed by the drunk hen party trying to get us all to do shots at 2pm.

I arrived in Edinburgh and shared a lift to the festival with Bec and we had some snacks and quickly got to rehearsing for our concert on Tuesday.

Great thing about a harp festival – you can go shopping and you know it’s all useful stuff. Ergonomic tuning key for a fiver? We’ll take as many as we can thanks!

There are so many harp-related things/music/t-shirts/postcards/jewellry/CDs/mugs/aprons! I need to remember not to spend too much money while I’m here.

Speaking of dilemmas, here’s one:

I have so much practice to do – seriously – I have a very important audition next month and sooo many notes to learn. So what do I do? Experience the festival properly by going to everything – knowing that I have all the more work to do when I get home – or hide myself away and try to practice? Maybe I’ll try and find a happy medium tomorrow.

But for now, I’ve eaten a lovely dinner thanks to Esther’s mum and am now tucked up in bed – let’s see what tomorrow brings.

Monday – Day Two

Today has been a long one. We arrived at the festival just after 10am, my fellow CLOUDS were booked in for a masterclass with the lovely Eleanor Turner but I:

a) wasn’t organised enough to get a ticket

b) actually quite wanted to just hang out at the festival, see the exhibitions, go shopping etc.

So until lunchtime I visited the showroom and looked at lots of new harps & harp accessories (my weakness!) I bought some awesome tape that has manuscript on it so if you want to re-write something enharmonically you just tape over it! What a find! I also bought some nice arrangements of wedding music that’s bound to come in handy. I think that’s all I bought today (not including food – oops).

I also went for a little walk down to the village of Colinton, about 15 minutes walk from the festival – I saw a couple of very nice looking restaurants that I’d love to try if I was staying for longer.

Anyway, we all met up for lunch – it’s so nice to see lots of RNCM harpists here – then CLOUDS went along to the class Esther was teaching to demonstrate some of the improvisation we do in our music. The class were so lovely and appreciative!

I’m ashamed to say that after the class, more shopping took place. We were shown some amazing carbon fibre lever harps (try saying that out loud – it’s hard!) which are unbelievably light and seemingly impossible to damage. These harps are the future! You can lift it with one hand easily, which we did, several times:

There is so much to see. Listing all the stands would take forever! There’s harp makers, harp music, harp cases, harp insurance, harp amplification, jazz harp, baroque harp, harp jewellry, greeting cards, stools, stands, tuning keys, bags, tuners, the list goes on and on and we want all of it!

Oh and there seem to be pots of Haribo everywhere too – what’s going on?!

I managed to squeeze in about half an hour of practice (shameful but better than nothing!) before CLOUDS began our last big rehearsal before our concert tomorrow night. We are borrowing beautiful, brand new harps from Holywell so we’re a bit nervous about doing all our usual extended techniques in case we break them! But we do it to our own harps all the time and I’m sure the lovely folks at Holywell trust us completely (cough).

At around 7.30pm we called it a day and headed back to Esther’s place in Peebles, lovely Peebles! I wish I was here for longer to spend some time just walking around and take in the breath-taking scenery – but we’re at the festival all day and when we get back we just have dinner and crash.

Tomorrow is concert day! Yayyy!

Tuesday – Day Three

For most of Tuesday morning/afternoon we took it quite easy to save our energy for the evening concert. We rehearsed for about an hour but for the rest of the time we mainly ate and chilled out. Bec and I found a lovely pub called the Spylaw Tavern so we thought we should take the opportunity and eat while we still had time. All the harps were moved for us by David from Holywell – which was brilliant.

The concert itself went really well. We had a great time and the hall was almost completely full. We got lots of lovely feedback too. After the interval we helped ourselves to a celebratory glass of wine and watched the second half of the concert – Eleanor Turner – who was fantastic, we are all in awe of her amazing playing!

Immediately after the concert the festival had laid on some wine and snacks for us. All my favourite foods were there: goats cheese, houmous, coleslaw, it was brilliant!

We then decided to carry on the party in Edinburgh at The Jazz Bar, where we stayed and danced to live jazz until just after 3am. Some of the current RNCM harpists came too and we had a really good catch up on all things harp/life related. I am slightly worried that we were a little rowdy when we got back to our rooms, we did our best to be quiet! Kind of…

Wednesday – Day Four

All of this brings us to Wednesday, day four. We knew we would need breakfast this morning but they only serve food until 9am – so this means we got around four hours of sleep. All we could do this morning was eat, pack, check-out of our rooms, and get to the city centre ready for my train.

So here I am at the Waterstones cafe on Princes Street, Edinburgh. My train is in a couple of hours and then I’ll be back in Manchester and it will be time to get back to work!

This has turned into a mammoth post – but these past few days have been great: lovely people, inspiring music and performances, great setting.

Harpists, if you are debating whether to go to this harp festival, I strongly urge you to go! There is something for everyone, whatever standard you are. If you like the harp, you’ll fit right in, trust me!

Career, Music

CLOUDS in Scotland with David Douglas

27 October 2014 2 Comments

Last Thursday the lovely Elfair Dyer and I set off from Manchester to go to Peebles in the Scottish Borders. After the compulsory stop at Tebay services on the M6 (best services ever?) we arrived late afternoon and began rehearsing for our concerts the following Friday and Saturday. Oh, and when I say ‘rehearsing’ what I actually mean is ‘learning the music’.

Waiting for us was Esther Swift. We usually play as a quartet but on this occasion Rebecca Mills was somewhere around Italy, entertaining the guests as resident harpist on board the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship.

The first gig of the weekend was at the Old Parish Church in Peebles, we were collaborating with the tenor David Douglas to play some Scottish folk songs together. We know David from our days at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, he was so lovely to work with! We definitely want to do more projects like this together. Esther and David also did a few songs just the two of them, and we played a few CLOUDS Harp Quartet pieces – Clouds (our first piece) and Twa Sisters (recently premiered at the Wales International Harp Festival last April) – both composed by Esther.

That evening, after the concert, we decided to go for a cheeky cocktail (or three) in Peebles:

I can’t tell you how lovely it is to hang out with these ladies, we work so hard together on the quartet but we are such good pals too. It was also the last time the three of us would be together for a while as Elfair is going away for a whole year soon – Elfy, what am I going to do without you??

The following day, feeling a little groggy, we made the two hour drive over to the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Ayr. This part of Scotland is so beautiful – especially at this time of year when all the leaves are changing colour. We performed for an absolutely lovely audience – one of whom even gave us extra money on the way out, saying she felt the concert was worth much more than the ticket price! What a sweetie pie.

I loved the staging in the Museum too:

It was really light and airy in there, don’t you think the harps look amazing?

After the gig it was time to pack up, say goodbye and head back down to Manchester – stopping for a burger in Tebay of course.

Uncategorized

CLOUDS mini-tour

4 September 2012 5 Comments

Last week was spent up in Scotland with my harp quartet CLOUDS.

The purpose of the week was to learn the material for our forth-coming album ‘water’, and to pay our way we would do four lunchtime concerts at St. Giles Cathedral up in Edinburgh Monday through to Thursday.

Learning music with CLOUDS is very different to how I was trained and it has been so good for all of us. Esther composes the music, then, without writing it down, teaches it to us aurally in group rehearsals.

Our first CD was entitled CLOUDS and we recorded it I think two years ago now. Water is so different, it’s much more exact whereas CLOUDS had lots of improvisation. Water is incredibly rhythmic, and often I think it’s very hypnotic as well – I’m really excited about its release in early October (it’s also available for pre-order now! Visit http://cloudsandharps.bigcartel.com/product/water )

The first few days of the ‘tour’ were pretty stressful. Bec’s car broke down in Manchester but she somehow managed to get up to Scotland, Esther’s car smelled of smoke every time she drove anywhere and, well, Elfair doesn’t have a car yet. So it was up to me to transport harps and harpists to and from the cathedral each lunchtime – luckily we have found a slick way to get two harps in one car!

Monday was easily the most stressful concert, well the concert was OK, getting there was another matter. It was the final day of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and what we hadn’t accounted for was that the street where we had special permission to park was CLOSED! And the traffic was at a standstill. But luckily a very nice traffic warden man told me where to find a little side street where I could park. Lovely.

That was with harps 1 & 2, with harps 3 & 4 our friendly traffic officer had disappeared and had been replaced by a much less nice lady who didn’t seem to understand that IT IS 12.40 WE WERE DUE TO PLAY AT 12.15 AND WE ARE ALL VERY STRESSED WHERE DO WE GO?!?!?!?!

I argued with her a little bit, most unlike me but I was stressed out!

Meanwhile, harps 1 & 2 were wondering where the rest of us were and trying to patch together a concert of solos and duets – from what I hear they did an excellent job considering the stress of the moment.

Compared with Monday, the rest of the lunchtime concerts ran smoothly – we sold lots of CLOUDS cds and got some lovely audience feedback.

Each afternoon we would learn a couple of movements of water to play the following day in the concert.

Friday was recording day.

I can’t believe we tried to record an entire CD in one day! After choosing a room in which construction work outside couldn’t be heard we started to record at around 2pm. We finished at 2am.

Ana – who was doing the recording for us – was lovely. She hadn’t had breakfast or lunch but didn’t tell us this fact until around 5.30 in the afternoon! She must have been ravenous. Sorry Ana.

At around 11.30pm Bec and I realised that the car park our cars were in closed at midnight – with any cars left getting towed away. What a lovely opportunity for a late night run through the streets of Edinburgh to ensure our cars weren’t taken away and crushed.

But despite the stress of the day and the situation, I think the recording went really well and I’m so excited to hear the finished product. There were lots of tears along the way but I’m so proud that we could learn the music and record it in five days – it was intense but great as well.