Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
It's little wonder that Catrin Finch finds working with Seckou Keita liberating. After all, there can't be too many gigs for a concert harpist where she gets to run her nail down a bass string with mock venom, use the harp's body as a conga drum and administer gleeful skelps instead of arpeggios.
This all happened during Future Strings, where Keita's kora was used to produce various effects, including a pantomimed rub of his beard. They're clearly completely at ease with each other, these musicians from different continents but although they're part of separate cultures, they're both also representatives of long traditions and it may be this that makes them such a natural musical pairing.
Then again, maybe it's just because they both happen to be great players.
When Finch introduced something from the sixteenth century Welsh harper Robert Ap Huw's manuscripts, Keita was able to add, in an entirely complementary way, a tale and melody of similar vintage from his own lands and the two flowed together like comingling streams. And so it went over two sets of absorbing, conversational interaction, some of it reflective, some of it spectacularly intense, some of it dancing to a celebratory rhythm.
A piece inspired by the building in the 1960s of a reservoir at Tryweryn found Finch playing both electro harp and the concert model and intoning folk memories of lost homes and flooded valleys while Keita tugged a sympathetic rhythm and voiced a wordless, soulful commentary
Church bells chimed figuratively. Ships sailed. Mists hovered and best of all, Finch became a veritable string band, riffing and grooving superbly alongside Keita's agile, high tensile melodising.