Weekend roundup, with frost
Dec. 1st, 2008 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI blame Gateshead council. They announce a Nordic Festival and Frost Fair, and behold, there is frost. Not the kind of frost that wouold impress people who live in places that have real winter, and probably not enough frost to have impressed me, once upon a time. But it's been a while since we had a whole weekend where the temperature stuck around freezing point - a degree or so above by day, a degree or so below overnight - so we make a fuss about it.
On Friday evening we had tickets for a concert of Hardanger fiddle music, and set off early to give ourselves time to look round the Frost Fair beforehand - which, as it turned out, did not take very long. There were a few Nordic visitors among the stalls - some friendly Icelanders plied us with tourist brochures (and this would be a good time to visit Iceland, it's true, one of the few countries whose currency is performing even worse than sterling), and I bought some Finnish coffee - but it was mostly the familiar range of local crafts and foods. The stalls were strung out along two sides of the concourse, on an icy night when they'd have done better to huddle together for warmth, and we scurried round, hoping vainly for someone selling hot food, then ended up going for a very unspecial curry before the concert.
The Greatest Girls of Norway were good, though - despite the rather odd name (which sounds as if it's been translated from the Norwegian by someone who hasn't done much translating). I hadn't realised that 'Hardanger fiddle' doesn't refer to the traditional music of the Hardanger region, but to the instrument, which differs from the 'ordinary' violin - particularly in having a second set of strings which are not bowed but vibrate sympathetically. This creates a drone effect which I would have expected to become tiresome, but was subtle enough to give a richness and fullness to the sound of the - traditionally solo - instrument.
On Saturday we drove down to Guisborough for a book signing by our client and friend Peter Walker (Nicholas Rhea). The drive down was wonderful - bright sblue sky and sparkling white fields, the plants in the hedgerows all outlined in frost and catching the sun. We met Peter and his wife Rhoda before the signing,in time for a quick lunch and some catch-up chat, and then had a happy afternnon exploring first the Guisborough Bookshop (a great Aladdin's cave of a shop, which has gradually extended itself further and further back into the building), and then the town itself. Then the drive back was wonderful in a different style - grey twilight floating a layer of mist between the white of the fields and the deepening pink of the sunset.
There was just time for a cup of coffee, and then we set off again for Gateshead and more music, this time a band called Uusikuu who play Finnish tango. If this seems like a bizarre and extraordinary combination of cultures, it's just that you haven't come across it before (but don't worry, you are not along: nor had the person hosting the event, and she made quite a meal of it, putting enormous effort into pronouncing the name 'Uusikuu'); it's a well known phenomenon, a major strand of Finnish popular music, tango in a minor key. (Don't take my word for it; here's Frank Zappa). Uusikuu play (it says here) "Finnish dancehall music from the 1930s to the 1960s" and while I enjoyed it all, I admit that I preferred the more upbeat songs to the intensity of the tango.
Sunday: Open Studios in the Ouseburn - but I've run out of time for this evening.
On Friday evening we had tickets for a concert of Hardanger fiddle music, and set off early to give ourselves time to look round the Frost Fair beforehand - which, as it turned out, did not take very long. There were a few Nordic visitors among the stalls - some friendly Icelanders plied us with tourist brochures (and this would be a good time to visit Iceland, it's true, one of the few countries whose currency is performing even worse than sterling), and I bought some Finnish coffee - but it was mostly the familiar range of local crafts and foods. The stalls were strung out along two sides of the concourse, on an icy night when they'd have done better to huddle together for warmth, and we scurried round, hoping vainly for someone selling hot food, then ended up going for a very unspecial curry before the concert.
The Greatest Girls of Norway were good, though - despite the rather odd name (which sounds as if it's been translated from the Norwegian by someone who hasn't done much translating). I hadn't realised that 'Hardanger fiddle' doesn't refer to the traditional music of the Hardanger region, but to the instrument, which differs from the 'ordinary' violin - particularly in having a second set of strings which are not bowed but vibrate sympathetically. This creates a drone effect which I would have expected to become tiresome, but was subtle enough to give a richness and fullness to the sound of the - traditionally solo - instrument.
On Saturday we drove down to Guisborough for a book signing by our client and friend Peter Walker (Nicholas Rhea). The drive down was wonderful - bright sblue sky and sparkling white fields, the plants in the hedgerows all outlined in frost and catching the sun. We met Peter and his wife Rhoda before the signing,in time for a quick lunch and some catch-up chat, and then had a happy afternnon exploring first the Guisborough Bookshop (a great Aladdin's cave of a shop, which has gradually extended itself further and further back into the building), and then the town itself. Then the drive back was wonderful in a different style - grey twilight floating a layer of mist between the white of the fields and the deepening pink of the sunset.
There was just time for a cup of coffee, and then we set off again for Gateshead and more music, this time a band called Uusikuu who play Finnish tango. If this seems like a bizarre and extraordinary combination of cultures, it's just that you haven't come across it before (but don't worry, you are not along: nor had the person hosting the event, and she made quite a meal of it, putting enormous effort into pronouncing the name 'Uusikuu'); it's a well known phenomenon, a major strand of Finnish popular music, tango in a minor key. (Don't take my word for it; here's Frank Zappa). Uusikuu play (it says here) "Finnish dancehall music from the 1930s to the 1960s" and while I enjoyed it all, I admit that I preferred the more upbeat songs to the intensity of the tango.
Sunday: Open Studios in the Ouseburn - but I've run out of time for this evening.
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-02 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-02 09:32 am (UTC)The festival was good, the Fair, not so successful...
no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 03:07 pm (UTC)Finnish tango...it is one of the best there is in this miserable world. Outside Argentina, that is. Only sadder and far more macabre. I would almost say: "more to the point" if it wasn´t slightly beside (the point).
I shall never forget seeing these wodka-faced fat-arsed (if you will excuse my habituarily wild way of expressing myself) aged couples dance the tango in a seedy hotel bar in far off Helsinki; their Leningrad-Cowboy-like visages frozen like stone grimaces and all this, with the utmost grace and desolately love-inducing finnish feeling after my ship trip across the boreal sea to Finland to learn some hald-ways decent english in my long gone silly youth in Scandinavia.
But your trip sounds just lovely too, loved reading it on this snowy day in Berlin, anyway!
no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 03:29 pm (UTC)The singer read a lovely line from a web site devoted to tango, to the effect that Finnish tango should not be confused with the fiery, passionate Argentine 'real thing': it was a gloomy, mournful music through which couples expressed their innate hopelessness. She was, naturally, delighted by this...