Claire Jones and Chris Marshall

Saturday 30th March 2019

Time 2.30pm

Our 2019 calendar opens, by popular demand, with our first afternoon concert.  We are delighted to welcome back,  also by popular demand, the wonderfully talented Welsh harpist Claire Jones, this time with her percussionist/composer husband Chris Marshall.

Claire’s last performance in Edington was not long after she had finished her tenure as Royal Harpist to HRH Prince Charles.  Since then she has become the UK’s top selling classical harpist, has started her own annual Harp School – and had a baby girl. As busy and enthusiastic as ever, she and Chris bring a unique dimension to both classical and contemporary harp music.  Chris’s brief appearance last time at her hugely-enjoyed concert is a sure sign that we shall be treated to a lively and very entertaining afternoon’s music, to be followed by tea and home made cakes.

For anyone interested, the percussion instruments Chris is bringing are: marimba, cajon, darabuka, castanets and tomtoms. And for information, courtesy of Wikipedia:

“The marimba is  a set of wooden bars struck with rubber mallets to produce musical tones. Resonators or pipes suspended underneath the bars amplify their sound. The bars of a chromatic marimba are arranged like the keys of a piano, with the groups of two and three accidentals raised vertically, overlapping the natural bars to aid the performer both visually and physically. It has a more resonant and lower-pitched tessitura than the xylophone.”

The cajon is basically a wooden box drum; the darabuka a goblet shaped drum from north Africa and the Middle East; castanets and tomtoms are probably familiar.