We drove over Calistoga Grade into our neighbor county, Napa, and turned right on Highways 29/ 128. It was slow going because of the tourist and wine-tasting traffic. In St Helena we jerked to a stop-and-start at the first stoplight. Napa is our wine-making rival, and haughty, palacial wineries dot this stretch of road.
Yountville, between St Helena and Napa, is well-known for two things. One is the French Laundry Restaurant, a pilgrimage site for monied foodies everywhere, where a couple can spend three hours and four hundred dollars (before wine) on dinner. The other is the Veteran’s Home, a slightly less exalted institution, but maybe slightly more useful in the great scheme of things.
The Lincoln Theater is on the Veteran’s Home property. Parking was a challenge because we were sharing space with the finish line of the Tour for the Cure bike race. We decided against valet parking, because Spouse has this funny reluctance to trust his truck to an unknown 19-year-old. Later we read in the program that the valets are the Ambassadors of Valet, so it might have been all right, but you never know.
The concert tickets were a wedding gift from our friend Kathleen. She got us seats in the Directors’ Circle, first row balcony with an unobstructed view of the stage. The MacPherson Pipe Band had played us in, and when the show started, they marched up to the front of the stage, played an air, and marched out.
Then the San Francico Fiddle Club musicians came out, all fifty-plus of them.
Alasdair Fraser started his first fiddle camp in Valley of the Moon, Sonoma, in 1986. It grew so much that he moved it to San Francisco. He has a second camp in the Grass Valley area, where the Scottish culture renaissance is very strong, and one in . . . Spain. Fraser’s love is 18th century strung and bowed instruments. All across Spain, musicians, singers and artists are reclaiming their hereditary music and instruments, so a fiddle camp is not so surprising after all.
The group on stage had fiddles, definitely, and guitars, cellos, one piano, one drum set, flutes and harmonicas.
Fraser is big on celebrating Scottish music in the Cape Breton Island tradition. They call it Nova Scotia for a reason, and Scottish fiddlers will tell you that Cape Breton Island saved Scottish music, keeping the old ways alive while, back in the homeland, the English and the Protestant church tried to stamp them out.
He is also big on fusion, mixing styles, influences and traditions. The group played a song a Scottish musician wrote commemorating Nelson Mandela’s visit to Glasglow. It started and ended with drums and guitars, morphing, in the middle, into a Scottish reel. They played a Spanish folk song and a comic rendition of “Under the Boardwalk” as a sing-along.
Clearly the club loves reels because they played a lot of them.
It wouldn’t be a Fiddle Club concert if there weren’t some guest performers. Stacy Putman, a former club student who now sings with the San Francisco Opera Company, came out and sang two songs in Gaelic, accompanied by Alasdair. Renata Bratt, a cellist with several CDs to her name, played couple of songs.
It was a beautiful day and a rousing concert. Spouse and I commented that the crowd was notably grayer than the Santa Rosa audience at last year’s show. Of course, we were in Napa, with valet parking, so frail older women in tartan skirts and discreet diamond earrings, chatting about their visits to Scotland last year, should not have a been a surprise. On the drive home, the truck shared the road with a Lexus SUV, a BMW and a Jag. And no, we did not stop for a leisurely three-hour and four hundred dollar dinner.
Lincoln Theater’s acoustics are close to perfect. The show was an amazing celebration, held on a beautiful day. Go, fiddlers!