Music > Live Reviews
Rhiannon Giddens -Francesco Turrisi - NNF 2023
St Andrews Hall
14/05/23
2023's Norfolk & Norwich Festival kicked off last night with a sold-out concert in St Andrew's Hall featuring American musician Rhiannon Giddens, together with her partner, Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. Their collaborative album 'They're Calling Me Home' was recorded in Ireland during lockdown, and won Best Folk Album at the 2022 Grammy Awards.
And it is with a song from that album, their powerful cover of the Alice Gerrard song 'Calling Me Home', that the concert commences, immediately filling tha vast hall space with the spine-tinglingly soulful vocals that have come to define Giddens' live performances. Next, she straps on the banjo and, accompanied by Turrisi on Mediterranean frame drum (not an Irish bodhrán, as he is later at pains to tell us), they perform 'Following The North Star', a jolly little amuse-bouche of a tune taken from Giddens' second solo album 'Freedom Highway'.
But it is the beautiful love song 'Quante Stelle Nel Cielo Con La Luna', written by Italian folk singer Lucilla Galeazzi, that provides the first of several genre surprises during the evening. Sung in Italian but with banjo accompaniment, it proves an unexpected delight. More akin to our expectations, perhaps, is the Little Hat Jones song 'Bye Bye Baby Blues', described by Giddens as a pre-blues number, this time with Turrisi on cello banjo. We are reminded that the banjo is derived from an instrument that arrived in America with the African slaves, and one of Giddens' missions is to reclaim the instrument from the minstel show stereotypes of 19th century musical culture.
Surprise number two comes with a piece taken from the score to 'Black Lucy and The Bard', a dance work originally performed by Nashville Ballet, based on poetry by Caroline Randall Williams, and with music composed by Giddens. The work was inspired by the 'Dark Lady' sonnets written by Shakespeare, and the possibility that he had a black mistress called Lucy. The first half concludes with the powerful and intense 'At The Purchaser's Option' (also taken from 'Freedom Highway'), and providing a wonderful lead-in to Giddens' suggestion that we take an interval stroll in the direction of the merch stand.
The second hald begins with a couple of fiddle tunes – one of Irish origin and one from the Shetlands, and then a powerful version of 'O Death', a song familiar to many of us from the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers' film 'O Brother Where Art Thou?' It was included on 'They're Calling Me Home' because of its resonance during the COVID lockdowns. In much lighter and happier mood was the soulful Cuban ballad 'Dos Gardenias', written in 1945 by Isolina Carillo but more recently re-popularised by the musicians of the Buena Vista Social Club.
We are again reminded of how the African banjo was hi-jacked by white musicians in the 1920's during Giddens' version of Ethel Waters' 'Underneath Our Harlem Moon', a song that Waters took from a crudely racist 1932 song by Mack Gordon. She changed the title and the lyrics, and has turned it into a gentle romantic celebration of Harlem culture. 'Carolina Gals / Last Night' is a North Carolinan hoe-down classic with lyrics and a tune that many will identify from its reworking by Malcolm McClaren in his 1982 hip-hop version, 'Buffalo Gals'. Boy that scratchin' is makin' me itch.
We are all moved to sing along during Giddens' version of the traditional spiritual hymn 'I Shall Not Be Moved', a song that Giddens learned from African-American fiddle player Joe Thompson, but that many of my generation still associate with the 1960's Civil Rights movement in America. This is followed with 'Build A House', a song inspired by the death of George Floyd, written by Giddens, and now published, with illustrations by Monika Mikai, as a children's story about justice and inclusivity.
The final song is one that Rhiannon Giddens sang at 'Homeward Bound', the recent television Grammy Salute to Paul Simon. At Simons' suggestion, a couple of lines in the song were changed, with Giddens singing that she did not arrive on The Mayflower, but that her people arrived “on a ship in a red blood moon”, with the song providing a truly emotional and inspirational way to end such a powerful and emotional second half of the show.
Yet the night could not end without an encore, and we were treated to a cheeky little version of 'You Put The Sugar In My Bowl', a light-hearted double-entendre song, intended to “leave us with a chuckle in our hearts”.
Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi did not put a foot wrong during this fabulous opening night of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival (even if there was an audible sucking of air through the teeth when Giddens referred to Norwich as “a lovely town”. However she is not the first and probably will not be the last to make that petit faux-pas). The lighting was marvellous and the sound, from where I was sitting in the raked seating at the back of the Hall, was absolutely perfect - never easy for an amplified performances at this venue.
The Norfolk & Norwich Festival runs until May 28th. Pick up a brochure, or go to www.nnfestival.org.uk/whats-on for further details.