PrettyInScarlett

A winter break in Ottawa visiting friends and old haunts included tickets to see Hey Rosetta! with Stars at the NAC . We were really excited to see Hey Rosetta! especially after a music buying spree at Compact Music (fortunate exchange rates). Southam Hall was completely full - combination of 2 different bands' worth of music fans - and whilst Hey Rosetta received slightly muted appreciation initially, this soon changed to lots of whooping. The set list (with help from Ottawa Citizen's review ) included: Soft Offering..., Gold Teeth, What Arrows, Young Glass, Neon Beyond, Harriet, Kintsukuroi, Welcome as well as older songs Yer Spring, Red Heart. Excellent performance, though with a bit less banter than I might have expected - and it was good to hear new songs as well as familiar songs (since our holiday apartment didn't have a turntable we went to the show without having heard new album Second Sight ).   Having never heard much of Stars before, we listened to a ...

Now both chamber festivals are over, I've finally had a chance to sit back and relax! As to which festival I most preferred, Music and Beyond and Chamberfest serve slightly different audiences and purposes; I found both immensely enjoyable. Chamberfest had the edge on big name stars, for example both Simone Dinnerstein , Marc-André Hamelin and Anton Kuerti on the piano side, along with groups such as the Nash Ensemble of London . Like Music and Beyond, I didn't go to a bad concert (there was some concert-goer discussion about the merits of Dinnerstein but I missed that show) so picking a clear favourite is difficult! In terms of innovation, Chamberfest's Late Night at the Kildare series was brilliant, with a wide range of 'fringe' chamber music. Cello grunge (courtesy of the Samurai String Squad ), Lara St. John performing Stomp! and Starbachs: The Coffee Cantata were all fantastic. It's a great breakout too - smaller audience, more intimate feel, slight ba...

Rain-drenched early crowd Second day of JazzFest complete with full waterproofs and wellies. A few hardly souls, myself included, headed to Confederation Park to see, in theory, the Laila Biali Trio . Another new one for me, but the JazzFest profile promised pop-oriented jazz from the pianist-songwriter plus George Koller and Larnell Lewis on bass and drums respectively. Sadly, Biali was held up at Ottawa Airport by the adverse weather, so the impromptu Koller-Lewis duo performed a set for the bedraggled attendees - at this point there was not so much a crowd as people in a field! The show also included a demonstration on dismantling Koller's new bass, which was very interesting! By the time Elvis Costello & The Imposters took to the stage the downpour had abated and more people had arrived. As a taster of things to come, the set started with Pump It Up and went on to include gems such as Watching The Detectives, Red Shoes and Alison, as detailed below (from Elvis Costell...

Something of a departure from our recent outings to see Finnish band Apocalyptica on 11 th March. After somewhat 're' discovering the band via this route , we were quite excited by the time Friday came. To detail the evening in reverse, Apocalyptica's show was superb, with a range of songs both old and new/transcriptions and originals. I particularly liked the more introspective mid-set performance of Beautiful (with drummer Mikko Sirén on a 4 th cello) and Sacra. As far as I recall and compared to setlists from other shows (none available for 11 th March), the setlist (compiled here from setlist . fm ) was as follows: On the Rooftop With Quasimodo 2010 Grace Master of Puppets ( Metallica cover) End Of Me (with Tipe Johnson) I'm Not Jesus (with Tipe Johnson) One ( Metallica cover) Refuse/Resist ( Sepultura cover) Beautiful ( Mikko Sirén left the drumset to play Cello for this song) Sacra Bittersweet Last Hope Bring Them to Light Seek & Destroy ( Me...