On The Cloth Trail

The Cloth Road is a marketing wheeze to promote an art trail linking a handful of towns and villages on the Somerset/Wiltshire border that historically had connections to the textile trade - Bradford-On-Avon, Trowbridge, Corsham etc. The Cloth Road may not be the Silk Road, but it has its bucolic charms. Mrs W and I sallied forth amidst Bank Holiday rain to sample some of them. Veterans of arts trails, we know that sometimes the venues are more interesting than the work And to see inside some ancient Norton St. Philip homes was a rare treat. The village has joined the trail for the first time this year and all power to its collective and creative elbow, but here the architecture triumphed over the art.

The real treats were to be found in Bradford (we got no further after a late start). We'd never visited the wonderful collection of buildings that was once Barton Farm before and what a surprise... Centred around a 14th century tithe barn, there are shops and a tea room and as part of the trail the tough, yet paradoxically elegant work of blacksmith Brian Greaves was on show. Brian, surprisingly, works on a narrowboat moored on the Kennet & Avon Canal just behind the barn.  I guess one advantage is that there's plenty of water about if the forge ever gets out of control...

So were we...

Then to Melissa Wishart exhibiting mostly coastal scenes in her beach hut-like summerhouse. We were moved to put our hands in our pocket and invest in a small and very reasonably priced moody Scottish seascape.

Finally to the Artemis Gallery where we chatted to the delightful Frome painter, Caroline Walsh-Waring, about the challenges of marketing art and encountered for the first time the remarkable work of Cath Bloomfield: intense and dense collographs of flora, fauna and females (with stitching). Fascinating.

The Cloth Road Arts Week continues until the 13th May.


www.clothroadartists.com


PS Down in Vallis Vale the wild garlic is in full flower and aroma. Well worth a wander.

Music to our ears?

To the Big Garage On The Hill (aka the Wiltshire Music Centre - see blog of 18.12.11) for Québecois trio, Genticorum.

The auditorium looked slightly less stark than at our last visit as the tastefully pastel-coloured acoustic panels had been put up to give the place a more intimate sound. But it still feels more car maintenance than concert hall. The band was good - technically highly proficient with oodles of good humour in their presentation. But only the a capella numbers gave the hairs on the back of my neck any exercise. This was perhaps more to do with the very nature of the French-Canadian music they play which, stripped of the big band arrangements of the likes of La Bottine Souriante or the more eclectic style of La Volée d'Castors, comes across as rather relentlessly repetitive.

It didn't help that for the whole of the first half Yann Falquet's guitar was virtually inaudible. I mentioned this to him in the interval (someone had to) and matters improved somewhat in part 2.That was until Yann whipped out his Jew's Harp (!)  - which we couldn't hear either.

There's not much point in playing a hall which trumpets "the best acoustic outside London", if your sound engineer has Van Gogh's ear for music.

www.genticorum.com

www. wiltshiremusic.org

Avon calling Peru

In our on-going investigation of the cultural life of the Somerset/Wiltshire borders, we sallied northwards on Saturday night to Bradford-On-Avon and, for the first time, the Wiltshire Music Centre.

A curious building, attached to a school, with a lop-sided foyer tacked on to an auditorium which, with its breeze-block walls, bare metalwork and grubby ceiling, resembles nothing more than an oversized garage.  Someone at Radio 3 once said it had the best acoustic outside London, and the Centre's marketing plays this up big time. Fair enough, but what the eyes take in also impacts on the concert-going experience - and this place is lacking any visual warmth or welcome.

Fortunately what was on the stage was not bits of giant Morris Minors, but the Paragon Singers of Bath, the Bradford Baroque Band and a handful of soloists. And they gave us a fascinating evening of mostly 17th Century Latin American music:  Christmas in Cuzco. European classical forms met traditional indigenous rhythms - and the results were often infectious, sometimes beautiful and always instantly accessible.

The  evening threw up a few questions too. This was music born out of barbarism (see Spanish Colonialism, Conquistadores etc), yet it was incredibly life-affirming. Paradox? And the lyrics were bizarre in their often direct address to the "blacks" - as far as the Spaniards were concerned, were these the native South Americans or their imported slaves?

The stars of the evening were percussionist Simone Rebello (cousin of jazz pianist Jason) and soprano Kate Semmens. The former, cool and elegant, switching effortlessly between a myriad of instruments. The latter, passionate and relishing this repertoire, looked like she was having to hold back her desire to bop around the platform to the catchy rhythms - clearly not 'the done thing' at a classical concert. Shame.

www.wiltshiremusic.org.uk

www.paragonsingers.co.uk

www.fantasiamusic.co.uk/classwind/bbb.html