Confluence Concerts last show of the season; All the Diamonds, was dedicated to the night sky.  It’s not easy to find new things to say about Confluence, unless there’s a new work or sometging on the programme.  Every show is different but there are elements in common.  The styles of the music vary from pop, to singer-songwriter, to jazz to classical to spoken word and the performance styles are equally varied and not always what one expects for the piece in question.  So for instance, Don McLean’s “Starry Night” got the Suba Sankaran/Dylan Bell two part a cappella treatment and the traditional Ladino number “Yo menamori d’un aire” got full on jazz vocals from Patricia ‘Callaghan with instrumentals from Larry Beckwith n violin and Andrew Downing on bass.  It was fun, varied and joyous and no two bits of the 23 item line up was quite like anything else.

Last night the usual suspects; Larry Beckwith, Patricia O’Callaghan, Andrew Downing and Suba Sankaran, were joined by Bradley Christensen, Dylan Bell, Robert Kortgaard and Lauren Estey, for works ranging from Debussy and Poulenc via Weill and Novello to DonMcLean and Bruce Cockburn and a whole lot more.  All this in the intimate and acoustically excellent Heliconian Hall.  Just a really enjoyable, stress free, evening of music and poetry.

We also got to hear about next season though with no dates as yet.  It sounds good.  I’m particularly excited by a Patricia O’Callaghan curated concert of Sean-nós coupled with more recent Irish language art song.  Memories of the Liverpool waterfront before it got tarted up for me there.  Andrew Downing is promising us Unsung Heroes; the neglected talent f the Tranzac club(!); a strange place hosting open sessions in a variety styles, the occasional “big act” (I saw Waterson/Carthy there once), and strange shenanigans from the AtG La Bohème to Toronto rugby sevens parties.  Larry Beckwith is curating Wound Turned to Light; a celebration of the music of James Rolfe and Suba Sankaran is bringing us Autorickshaw at 20.  Teiya Kasahara and David Eliakis are threatening to do to Schumann’s Dichterliebe what they did to Mozart’s Die Zauberflōte.  If you saw early incarnations of The Queen in Me you can probably predict what it will be like.  And that’s not all, as they say.  Check the Cnfluence website for more details, tickets and so on.