New York, NY (Top40 Charts) As noted earlier this week in the Nonesuch Journal, Rhiannon Giddens and Punch Brothers came together over the weekend to perform songs from their respective new albums, Tomorrow Is My Turn and The Phosphorescent Blues, on a double bill at the Southern Fried Festival in Perth, Scotland, on Friday. The performances, held at Perth Concert Hall by the River Tay, were featured on a two-hour show of highlights from the festival on BBC Radio Scotland's Another Country with Ricky Ross last night. The first hour is devoted to Giddens, the second hour to Punch Brothers. You can hear it at bbc.co.uk.
The concert earned perfect five star reviews from both the Scotsman and the Herald Scotland.
The Scotsman's Jim Gilchrist notes Punch Brothers' "instrumentally virtuosic line-up" and reports that Giddens "brought the audience to its feet with a voice that could swoop from angelic soaring to earthy growl, informed by riveting emotional power and authority." Read the review at scotsman.com.
The Herald Scotland's Rob Adams is equally effusive. "A stage-commanding figure who applies her opera training in a similar way to her forebear, Odetta, in projecting music with honesty and majesty," he writes in his five-star review, "Giddens took her superb musicians and the audience on an American roots music tour ... Her whole set ... was sensational and delivered with great warmth and disarmingly friendly authority."
"Sublimely orchestrated musicianship," he later writes of Punch Brothers, "be it on Familiarity's ultra-sophisticated pop or Debussy's Passepied, and wonderfully dovetailing vocal harmonies that can run the gamut from choirboy sweetness and near silence to thigh slappin' beer cellar raucousness flowed ... and the individual instrumental breaks were breath-taking in their fluent, inventive musicality."
Read the Herald review at heraldscotland.com.
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