- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -
- Andrew Cronshaw MySpace -

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -

Written in Folk Roots issue 180, 1998

LLIO RHYDDERCH
Telyn
Fflach CD196H (1997)

For British traditional musics this is a crucial album, from a musician whose wider public recognition is a big event for real, not dressed-up, Welsh tradition. There’ll be much more about Llio Rhydderch in a forthcoming Folk Roots interview, but the immediate issue in terms of record reviewing is that this is a brilliantly played album of Welsh tunes learnt partly from oral tradition and partly found in manuscripts, all developed with sparkling variations using the capabilities of the Welsh triple harp for fast reiteration and chromaticism. Most here is solo triple harp (though much of it sounds like at least two players); on some tracks Llio plays single-action pedal harp, and there’s a guest appearance by five of her young students and one track with whistle, fife and fiddle.
      The triple harp, a dramatic-looking instrument with a very high head, has three rows of strings, the two on the outside tuned alike and the one running down the middle giving the chromatic semitones, sounded by reaching past the outside rows. Though it became a national icon it nearly went out of use when most Welsh players went over to the double-action concert harp system, which has a single row of strings in which keys are changed by a set of foot pedals. In doing so they lost a whole lot of the abilities, particularly ways of developing variations, that were an essence of the music.
      Llio is certainly a new wave, but she isn’t in her early twenties, she’s in her late fifties. For twenty years she encountered little interest in her music, and it’s only now, not through the ponderous processes of the National Eisteddfod but largely via the enthusiasm of other musicians such as Fernhill’s Ceri Rhys Matthews at the new Fflach Welsh music label, and strong appreciation abroad, that she’s reaching the acclaim she deserves. In her resides the living tradition of the old Welsh harpers in all its glory.


© 1998 Andrew Cronshaw
 

You're welcome to quote from reviews on this site, but please credit the writer and fRoots.

Links:
fRoots - The feature and review-packed UK-based monthly world roots music magazine in which these reviews were published, and by whose permission they're reproduced here.

It's not practical to give, and keep up to date, current contact details and sales sources for all the artists and labels in these reviews, but try Googling for them, and where possible buy direct from the artists.
CDRoots.com in the USA, run by Cliff Furnald, is a reliable and independent online retail source, with reviews, of many of the CDs in these reviews; it's connected to his excellent online magazine Rootsworld.com 

For more reviews click on the regions below

NORDIC        BALTIC        IBERIA (& islands)   

CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE, & CAUCASUS   

OTHER EUROPEAN        AMERICAS        OTHER, AND WORLD IN GENERAL

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -