HAMISH NAPIER
The Woods.
Philippe Cousin
After The River in 2016 and The Railway in 2018, Scottish composer Hamish Napier continues his ambitious journey through the Speyside Valley, his home region in the heart of the Highlands with The Woods.
His completed project will include five albums inspired by the landscape and people of Speyside, each representing one of the five elements: water, fire, earth, wind and space.
This time it is a commission from the Cairngorms Collect, which has embarked on an ambitious 200-year process of habitat and species improvement, a vast ecological process at the heart of the Cairngorms National Park.
The album succeeds in combining music, local culture, the Gaelic language and the natural environment of the area. To achieve this H. Napier has written melodies based on the Gaelic alphabet, which has only 18 letters. An alphabet derived from the Ogham alphabet, traditionally taught to children through the names of trees.
Hamish composed a tune for each letter, as well as others for legends, creatures and stories from the forest. Twenty-one titles illustrating this vast epic, each one more beautiful than the next, all presented in a superb monochrome case.
The music he offers us in the company of a dozen musicians is as varied as the landscapes it magnifies and all the tunes originate in the Scottish tradition, although Hamish's arrangements give it an obvious contemporary touch.
One passes successively from one mood to another as the rhythms change, sometimes slow and majestic, sometimes more playful. Hamish has added to his music a few recordings gleaned from the wilderness, the songs of swifts, wood pigeons, tawny owls and the iconic Highland bird, the capercaillie, on Forest Time, to which the river song and the sound of loggers' saws are added on The March of the Lumberjills.
Of all these instrumentals, there is only one song, The Highest Willows, which Calum MacCrimmon performs in the style of Ceól Mór.
A superb, brilliant album, epic in many ways. A total success.