Rachel Newton adds art gallery soundtracking to her ever growing CV.

Release Date: Available now

Label: Hudson Records

Format: digital / CD mediabook

In a career that’s forged many paths and charted a satisfyingly unpredictable course, Rachel Newton sets off on a new one. An album of pieces that started life as a commission for the National Galleries of Scotland and coinciding with the opening of the new Scottish Galleries. The latter a home to a huge collection by Scottish painters some of which have inspired this music.

Some might argue the case for Rachel’s harp being the perfect accompaniment to an appreciation of visual art. Irrefutable proof coming in a series of twelve evocative pieces sees each track on the album based on a particular painting, drawing on the mythology, language, history, culture and landscapes that originally set the scene for these artworks.

The combination of more standard song pieces with instrumental arrangements and and the inclusion of found sounds from Grant Anderson (waves, birdsong and the harp playing in the wind) offers a variety of musical excerpts; the album title referring to a Gaelic word that once evokes a view or spectacle, the power of vision and elements of the supernatural.

Opening track The Entrance gives a flavour of what to expect from the ambient pieces. Hardly a harp in sight at least not in the traditional manner – it could be the ‘wind in harp strings’ effect, but the first of four pieces (Despair, The Stress and The Victory) inspired by the four tapestries of Traquair’s The Progress of the Soul. Thought to depict the soul’s journey from birth through the trials of life to ultimate salvation, it’s all very spiritual as the images are given gentle and fragile musical vignettes at punctuation points on the album.

More traditional Newton fare comes via The Storm where her harp is accompanied by Alice Allen’s rich and aching cello part as it does on Saint Bride, and the almost solo harp pieces, Quiet Sunset Machrihanish and Machrihanish Bay. Wide open landscapes painted by both artist and musician. The vocal tracks include a hunting The Sailing Of The Emigrant Ship, Harvest Moon (incorporating a poem about the moon from the Camina Gadleica), Saint Bride and Dierdre Of The Sorrows and if the title Angus Og, The God Of Love And Courtesy Putting A Spell Of Summer Calm On The Sea doesn’t invoke an image and have you looking up the work (I did…) then …simply refer to the lovely packaging which reveals all in terms of a quick guide to the works of art.

The overarching mood is one of quiet solitude and contemplation, Scottish sea, sky and landscape and a whole host of intricacies and subtleties to uncover. The work of the artists – John Duncan, William McTaggart and Phoebe Anna Traquair – is genuinely enhanced by Rachel Newton’s compositions on this enthralling journey of discovery.

In a moment that brought full circle closure,Sealladh was perfromed in the recently unveiled Scottish Galleries space in Autumn 2023 – surrounded by the very artworks which served as the album’s inspiration.

Here’s Dierdre Of The Sorrows:

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