Alasdair Fraser

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Added: Mon. Nov 16, 2009 9:58pm
Posted in: Living

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 I went to a concert by Scottish fiddler extraordinare Alasdair Fraser and his musical partner, cellist Natalie Haas Saturday night, and I'm still tapping my feet to the music.  The setting was perfect--Milwaukee's Irish Cultural and Heritage Center, located in a marvelous old limestone church dating from the 1880s, the Grand Avenue Congregational Church on Wisconsin Avenue. 

Despite the modern traffic going past outside--buses, cars, police cruisers with sirens, the sounds of the evening--the building itself was like stepping into a time warp and crossing the Atlantic to the land of heath and fog.  Massive timbers overhead, a gargantuan pipe organ reaching to the rafters, carved wooden church pews instead of concert seats.  As the pair started playing, the man in my life settled in with a Guinness and handed me a glass of wine.  "If they'd let me drink in church when I was younger, I might have gone more often," he jested.

This was my first Alasdair Fraser concert, and we left with a CD apiece, mine with autographs!  It was an amazing evening, not just for the absolutely smokin' fiddling, but for the built in history lesson, and the humor, and the depth, and Fraser's ability to keep us in the palm of his hands as a raconteur between sets, vividly depicting Scotsmen in kilts bedeviled by midges, candle-lit drawing rooms with claret and minuets, and the absolutely primitive, tribal, life-affirming joy that comes with dancing to a jig or a reel.  This was toe-tapping, hand-clapping, foot stomping music for much of the time, interspersed with stretches of slower pieces that were both haunting and mesmerizing.  We were fortunate, as well, in that our seats were absolutely perfect.  Only three rows from the stage, with, for some lucky reason, absolutely no one in front of us to block our view.  Close enough to see very expression that crossed Fraser's face as his gaze met Natalies while they played, and close enough to hear the sound, not just of the amplifier, but the instruments themselves. 

I was never a big fan of the violin up until perhaps a year ago.  About a ten years of piano lessons of my own as a child, followed by an aggregate of eighteen years of listening to my children practice for their own piano lessons--along with the walnut-veneered baby grand taking up the space of an elephant in my living room--pretty much put piano music at the top of my musical short list.  But then my youngest turned his sights on the violin not all that long ago, filling my house with Irish music from my own heritage.  I watched him attend a "master class"  one day last spring with a visiting group called "Quartet San Francisco," and came away with a brand new appreciation of just how expressive a violin could be. 

Likewise, this concert was equally a revelation.  Fraser and Haas together create a sound that far surpasses simply fiddlin'.  The addition of Haas' cello took the music to an entirely different dimension, not just adding musical tracks but the feel of elemental drumbeats at times.  I left wondering why I'd ever want to listen to a violin that didn't have a cello alongside it!

It was a truly magical night.  Alasdair and Natalie were beyond splendid!!

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