Following the cancellation of the weekend city festival in Cork last November, Quiet Lights have been developing an online series of events with the best names in Folk & Trad across the country. Recent concerts have included Iarla Ó Lionaird & Steve Cooney, NAVA, Strung, Brìghde Chaimbeul, Jamie Murchadh, Aoife Blake and Marlene Enright, and now Quiet Lights brings the next in their series of online events – ‘VARO live from Connolly’s of Leap’ which you can watch in full below.
Varo are a dublin based duo – Consuelo Nerea Breschi from Italy and Lucie Azconaga from France. In February last year, Thomas Blake reviewed their debut album on Folk Radio:
Varo come from the same sphere of Dublin musicians that has recently given us the likes of Lisa O’Neill, Ye Vagabonds and Lankum, and while these acts are different in many ways, they all share a deep understanding of traditional music, and of how to balance the desire to preserve the genre’s heritage with the need to create a form of music that is fresh and new. It is an exciting time for Irish folk music, and Varo’s accomplished debut should position them at the forefront of the scene. Read the full review here.
The duo met in 2015 having moved to Dublin to pursue their love for Irish traditional music and immediately started a fruitful collaboration. They travelled to Ireland along different musical paths, Lucie from jazz, classical music, and French folk, Consuelo from Irish trad, folk, and world music.
Over the years, Lucie and Consuelo have had the pleasure of working on various other projects, such as Landless, Lisa O’ Neill‘s Band, Ye Vagabonds, The Morning Tree, Alasourse, The Nomadic Piano Project; and now, they are assembling a talented group for a new collaboration album featuring 12 of Ireland’s most exciting and exceptionally talented traditional and folk musicians on the scene: Ian Lynch (Lankum), Junior Brother, Slow Moving Clouds, Niamh Bury, Inni-K, John Francis Flynn, Cormac McDiarmada (Lankum) + Ruth Clinton, Anna Mieke, Lemoncello, Alannah Thornburgh, Landless, Branwen, and Alfi. The project is set for release later in 2021.
Speaking about their trip to Connolly’s of Leap where they filmed in December 2020, Varo said:
“We were honoured to be invited to play for the Quiet Lights Festival and to perform in beautiful Connolly’s of Leap. It was our first time for both of us in this iconic venue, we had heard so much about it from our friends who had played there before, we were super excited and we absolutely loved it. From what we knew, Connolly’s history was rooted in a deep sense of community and we felt it as soon as we entered the building.
We performed in the main room and where we premiered a traditional emigration song with a loop that Lucie had created as background track for it and that we worked on during the lockdown called “Path Across the Ocean”, as well as a new set of tunes, and ‘As I Roved Out’, a song from our first album.
We loved having a chat with Sam in the Pub, and it couldn’t have been a better moment to sing an a cappella song, ‘The Doffing Mistress’, like in the old way, at a session by the fire.
It has been amazing to work with such a professional crew in such a beautiful and safe environment.
We were amazed to see how this empty venue, during a pandemic, could somehow transmit all the magical atmosphere and warmth that it used to have, like if somehow the walls were keeping the history and holding it for us, until we return to the way things were before.”
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