'The Blend' festival
15 - 19 March 2006
Background and context
The programme 2006
Booking information
The Blend is back for its fourth year, bringing Scotland and the UK’s best in traditional and contemporary roots music to Stirling. Taking place at the city’s Tolbooth and Albert Halls venues, the festival runs from 15 – 19 March 2006.
The Blend is obviously doing something right. In just four year’s, one of Scotland’s newest music festivals has expanded its three-day programme to a five-day programme, offering the public more of the finest musical talent from around the UK, and from Scotland in particular.
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Providing ‘a heady mix of the traditional and the contemporary’, the Blend ‘is inspired by Scotland’s past but is not trapped there’. This is reflected in a programme which features old-hands and newcomers performing ancient melodies and new commissions, and everything in between. |
The five days of the festival have something to offer audiences who wish to watch or to join in. Each night features a performance at 7.30 pm, preceded by free sessions in the Tolbooth Café Bar at 6.30 pm, except on Friday 17 March, when Jenna Reid and Kevin MacKenzie set the tone for the weekend with the Five O’Clock Fling in the Tolbooth theatre. There are lunchtime sessions from 12 noon – 2.00 pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Come and Try events take place from Friday to Saturday and include tuition in song, fiddle, step dancing and tin whistle.
At the heart of the festival is the fantastic quality of live performance. The evening programme kicks off on Thursday 16 March with a double bill of the Alasdair Roberts Trio with Chris Wood, co-winner of with Hugh Lupton of the 2006 BBC2 Folk Award for Original Song. Colin Steele, our Artist of the Month, features as a guest trumpeter with Bachue on Sunday 19 March.
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Other artists performing this year are:
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Drama and film are also included in the menu, with a screening of Lomax the Songhunter on Sunday 19 March at 2.30 pm. The film documents the life and work of Alan Lomax, an American whose service to music was his recording of songs for posterity. This is followed by Marbles, Cardboard & Fridge Magnets, a recently commissioned work which ‘captures the germination of the creative process that culminated in a fabulous evening of music and art at the Tolbooth in September 2005.’ For the Islands I Sing is the Festival’s opening performance, bringing to life the poems and tales of George Mackay Brown, the ‘Bard of Orkney’.
A pass for all the 7.30 pm shows is available for £44 (£38 concession), or there is a 10% discount when you buy a ticket for two 7.30 pm shows.
Supported by Stirling Council, EventScotland, the Tolbooth and The Albert Halls. |