Performing at the Ullapool Guitar Festival in October 2024

Written on 10 November 2024

I'm writing this post a month late, but it feels like I was just in Ullapool yesterday! My first time performing as an artist at a guitar festival combined with the excitement of staying in the Scottish Highlands means this was really an experience I won't be forgetting.

In August (before I had even come to Scotland), two other masters students at the Royal Conservatoire and myself were invited by our professor Allan Neave to go play at the Ullapool Guitar Festival in the Scottish Highlands. Normally, he attends himself and gives a concert, but this year he was just too busy. I'm told it was quite a break in tradition -- apparently he had attended for 22 straight years, save for the COVID years when the festival didn't happen.

All the stars aligned for us students. Accommodation and food were included, plus the school kindly reimbursed us for transportation.

Ullapool is so isolated that it's impossible to get there by train -- you have to take a train to Inverness, and then get on a bus that will wind through gorgeous scenery for about two hours before arriving at Ullapool. So at around 9 AM on a Thursday morning, we boarded the train from Glasgow Queen Street towards Inverness. Unfortunately the train was packed, so we weren't able to get seats together. I was stuck sitting in a gaggle of kids, while Valentin and Abbey (the other masters students) and Abbey's husband Azariah were forced to sit at other locations around the train car. The train ride stops an annoying number of times, but the incredible scenery as you approach the highlands makes the extra time in the train well spent. At Inverness we had a grocery store lunch, before getting on the bus to Ullapool. The bus was entirely deserted except for us three, and the driver didn't even check my ticket! We arrived in Ullapool rather tired and hungry, but luckily the town is located on the coast and known for its excellent fish. I had a wrap from the aptly named Seafood Shack, where every single thing on the menu contained seafood. It was excellent, and I was told that my food had been swimming less than 24 hours ago!

The next day, we were treated to two amazing concerts. The first was by Czech guitarist Petra Polackova, who I'd first seen in concert this past summer at the 2024 Guitar Foundation of America Convention in Fullerton, California. Petra has a way of making the concert effortless for the listener -- she creates phrases that just seem to flow from one to another without ever interrupting the pulse of the music. Her concert focused on music from the romantic era, and she also performs on a guitar from the romantic era, with several extra bass strings for added resonance. All artists at this festival played for a mic system, which is something I usually dislike, but understood in the context of this festival where many different types of guitars were being performed on. The sound of a classical guitar would be completely overshadowed by that of a steel string or amplified gypsy jazz guitar.

That evening, we saw Antoine Boyer (guitar) and Yeore Park (chromatic harmonica) perform as a duo in what turned out to be my personal favorite concert of the festival. The sheer talent of these two is unbelievable -- Antoine has some incredible improvisation skills, but also the ability to whip out blisteringly fast scales whenever he felt like it. Yeore had a superb sense of melody, and even though she was improvising, she was able to create really beautiful melodic moments in the music. Overall, they had terrific chemistry as a duo and the concert couldn't have been better.

The next day, three RCS students (Valentin Danisevicius, Abbey Felton, and myself) performed in a concert, each playing about 20 minutes of music. I played the Prelude and Gigue from Bach's first keyboard partita (BWV 825), followed by The Blue Madeleine, a three part composition by London-based Italian guitarist Giacomo Susani. The crowd was really receptive and overall the atmosphere was just great. It was one of the most fun performances I've ever given. Unfortunately I have no recording of it, so you will just have to imagine a good performance! ;)

The last concert I saw was by guitarist Clive Carroll. I'd never seen a solo steel-string guitar concert before, and so I didn't know what to expect. Much of the music he played was based on banjo music and traditional Irish music, with a bit of blues mixed in occasionally. Overall, the playing was incredibly idiomatic, and he seemed utterly relaxed on stage in a way that made the audience feel the same way. I highly recommend checking out his music!

On my last day there, I decided to go climb a hill located right next to the down. It wasn't too tall, but gave a great view of the town and the inlet next to which it was located. The scenery was absolutely gorgeous. Even after having gone to several American national parks, the Scottish countryside is really some of the prettiest nature I've ever seen. The Scottish Highlands are picture-perfect at every turn -- a mix of mountain, forest, river, ocean, and grassland, without too much of any. I don't think I'd ever get tired of it if I lived there.