Sharron Kraus & Harriet Earis
Album: Winter Songs
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 15
Website: http://www.sharronkraus.com

Recorded live back in 2013 in a church at Ysbyty Cynfyn in deepest Wales, this is a delightful collection of carols, folksongs and music to bring in the festive season. The predominant atmosphere of the album is conjured by the conjoining of wintry crispness and old-fashioned fireside warmth - it's exactly what we might wish from traditional seasonal music, fresh and wholesome and stimulating, without recourse to over-arrangement or needless sentimental trappings.

Sharron and Harriet deliver this convivial experience through an authentic and thoroughly charming tonal blend of delicate, beautiful and evocative instrumentation centring round the combination of Appalachian dulcimer and whistles with the timeless timbre of Celtic harp, together forming the ideal foil for Sharron's stylish and charismatic singing.

Sharron's own lovely composition To Shorten Winter's Sadness is a perfect illustration of the haunting, closely matched collaboration between these two accomplished musicians, while their thoughtful adaptations of the traditional carols Down In The Forest, The Coventry Carol and The Cherry Tree Carol prove highly competitive in an already crowded field.

The disc's purely instrumental selections are altogether less well-known than the vocal items and encompass a wide provenance, from medieval Welsh harp piece Caniad San Silin to a pair of Welsh fiddle tunes and the Shetland processional Christmas Day In The Morning. Harriet's self-penned Snow Chains/Mouth Of The Tobique set contains some particularly sprightly playing, as does the animated transposition into reel-time (by Sille Ilves) of two old Welsh tunes that closely follows it. This attractively-presented album is an ideal midwinter tonic, in other words.

David Kidman