Thu 19th April, 2018
8:00 pm - 10:30 pm (Doors: 7:30pm)
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The Cafe is open this evening, last orders at 6.30pm
Winners of the 2016 BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Best Original Track, The Rheingans Sisters make playful, powerful and richly connecting music that is wholly contemporary while deeply anchored in folk traditions. Drawing on their pan-European musical scholarship (having studied extensively in France, Sweden and Norway) and their spirited mission to make connections between the music of different geographical roots, they have developed a rich artistic approach to the de-construction and reimagining of traditional music alongside their own beguiling compositions.
Since the release of their award-winning album Already Home (2015) audiences across the UK, Europe and Australia have been captivated by their live performances; as full-hearted performers and on-stage improvisors – via the adven-turous use of fiddles, voices, banjo, bansitar, tambourin à cordes, poetry and per-cussion – The Rheingans Sisters are a unique and unmissable act on the folk and world music stage today.
Their hotly anticipated third album ‘Bright Field’ is released in March 2018.
Fiddle-singers and multi-instrumentalists Rowan and Anna Rheingans grew up in the Peak District, surrounded by traditional music and encouraged to pick up the fiddle by their musician mother and violin-maker father from an early age. Rowan is a well known on the English folk scene as part of hugely popular BBC Folk Award nominated trio Lady Maisery as well as for her work with Nancy Kerr & The Sweet Visitor Band and the Songs of Separation super-group alongside Eliza Carthy and Karine Polwart. Anna lives and works as a fiddle player in Toulouse and is an expert in southern French folk music, having recently gained a 1st class diploma from the Conservatioire Occitan. As both sisters have also spent a significant amount of time studying fiddle music in Sweden and Norway, they pull a range of influences from both northern and southern European fiddle traditions into their own interpretations, compositions and arrangements.
The Rheingans Sisters’ debut album Glad Gold Hearts was released on Rootbeat Records in June 2013 to wide critical acclaim. Songlines described them as “musical miscegenation with unabashed confidence, a duo of considerable abilities and imaginations to match” and nominated Rowan and Anna for Best Group and Best Newcomer in the Songlines Music Awards.
Their second, award-winning album Already Home, recorded over just five days in a remote forest studio in mid-Wales, is an enticing, thoughtful and adventurous record that quickly caused a stir when it was released in November 2015. Amongst a flurry of fantastic reviews, The Independent called Already Home ‘superb’, fRoots made them a cover-feature and described the album as “quite simply extraordinary” and Folk Radio UK hailed it as “not only a beautiful and exceptional record, but an important one”. It reached the top 10 albums in the 2015 fRoots Critics Poll Album of the Year, was awarded a Songlines ‘Top of the World’ award and earned Rowan and Anna no less than two nominations at the 2016 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. As well as being nominated for the ‘Horizon’ award which celebrates the best new acts on the UK’s folk scene, they won ‘Best Original Track’ for the song Mackerel.
PRESS QUOTES
“Superb” – The Independent
“Quite simply extraordinary” – fRoots
“Magnificent” – Songlines
“reverie on stage” – The Canberra Times
“Already Home is unhurried music of heart and ease and lyricism, with gorgeous new songs that sound already timeless, that reek of earthly human connection and longing; a warm hug of an album.” – Karine Polwart