Hamish Napier and Su-a Lee
Portobello Town Hall, 19/10/25
Hamish Napier and Su-a Lee
I learnt a new word at this concert from Su-a Lee, to ‘folkify’, that is to give a folk flavour to classical music. She did this with a movement from the Bach Cello Suites, giving it a certain swing that it didn’t have in the original! This really was at the heart of this concert from 2 fine musicians. Su-a Lee is known and loved throughout Scotland as a cellist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. You can’t miss her – she’s the musician who often turns up with bright coloured hair and smiles and laughs her way through the concert. She makes you feel that she loves making music and giving the audience pleasure; for me she does that every time. She is also well known for the classical/ folk mix in her recent CD, ‘Dialogues’ (Sky Child Records, 2023). Today she is accompanied by her husband, Hamish Napier, a renowned folk musician who plays the piano and the flute and is a singer and composer. Hamish has also been crossing boundaries between folk, jazz and classical music, often with an environmental theme, as for instance in his recording ‘The Woods’ (Glo Worm Recordings and Carrier Waves, Glasgow, 2019). Today’s concert was a perfect example of both their talents and how the folk and classical traditions can influence each other and produce a new sound that enhances our musical life.
The concert was held in Portobello Town Hall, which was new to me but is a welcome addition to the cultural scene in Edinburgh. It has recently been refurbished and is run as a charity with a very active group of volunteers who were very helpful at this concert. It holds over 500 people and I was astonished to find it was pretty full on Sunday, a remarkable feat for a ‘folkify’ concert outside the festival season. The audience certainly loved the concert giving a warm response to the various works by Hamish and Su-a which went from original compositions by Hamish to classical works by Su-a like the Bach excerpts. I also discovered that Su-a is not only a very fine cellist but very good at introducing the music; their joint introductions helped us to understand and enjoy the music. A friend at the interval described the concert as a bit like an old Edinburgh tradition of a Sunday afternoon drawing room concert, except that the drawing room held 500 people!
The cheers at the end of course demanded an encore and Su-a produced her other instrument, a large saw, bought several years ago in The Netherlands. She produced incredible music on this unlikely instrument, in this case a rendition of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’. It brought the house down and proved a perfect end to a lovely Sunday afternoon concert.
