Adrianna Ciccone & Ellen Gibling: The Pear Tree
Adrianna Ciccone & Ellen Gibling

Given the strong connections they share, fiddler Adrianna Ciccone and harpist Ellen Gibling were a collaboration waiting to happen. Both are based in Kjipuktuk / Halifax,Nova Scotia and each naturally gravitates to the kind of timeless folk music featured on The Pear Tree. It's a Christmas album that couples traditional English, French, and Italian carol melodies with originals by each musician; the set-list, however, is not so centred on Christmas that The Pear Tree can't be enjoyed any time of year. If anything, hearing this enchanting recording during the sweltering days of summer might make one long for winter's return. That the two could pass for sisters only makes the partnership seem all the more natural.

Drawing for inspiration from Québécois and Appalachian fiddling, Ciccone was raised in the Ottawa Valley fiddle tradition and is as comfortable playing a Cape Breton reel as a Southern Appalachian stringband tune. She and her sister Catarina operate Merry Time Music Co., a community-minded music school in Halifax, and Adrianna instructs over 200 students weekly at the school and in Halifax public schools. The Pear Tree isn't her first appearance on record, that being her 2015 debut album, The Back of Winter, which helped garner her the Instrumental Artist of the Year award at the 2015 Canadian Folk Music Awards.

Gibling, who acquired a BMus in classical harp performance from McGill and an MA in Irish traditional music performance from the University of Limerick, issued the terrific solo harp album The Bend in the Light in 2022, which was nominated for the Canadian Folk Music Awards' Instrumental Solo Artist of the Year and Music Nova Scotia's Traditional/Roots Album of the Year. The versatile harpist has played with Symphony Nova Scotia, toured with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, and premiered new Canadian chamber and orchestral works. When not performing solo, she performs with a number of groups, including New Hermitage, The Bombadils, Many Worlds, and others.

All other projects were set aside, however, when the two convened to record The Pear Tree, which recorded live off the floor at in Graeme Campbell's Halifax studio exudes spontaneity and captures the duo's telepathic rapport. All but one of the eight pieces combines two or three pieces, with the transitions effected so seamlessly you hardly notice. Both musicians take the lead at various times, with the two switching roles with ease. The rustic cry of Henri Martinet's “Petit Papa Noël” serves as a lovely invitation that the pieces to which it's conjoined, Thoinot Arbeau's sixteenth-century French dance tune “Ding Dong Merrily on High” and Finbarr Dwyer's Irish polka “The Ardgroom,” make good on. The fiddle-harp combination beguiles from the first moment, regardless of whether the music's a wrenching lament or jubilant dance tune. Accomplished players both, Ciccone and Gibling execute the material with authority, their love for the music evident at every turn.

Performed in 7/4 with deep feeling is “In the Bleak Midwinter,” Gustav Holst's setting of Christina Rossetti's poem, which is coupled with Gibling's high-velocity reel “The Anticipation.” A radiant song Ciccone wrote to celebrate a niece's birth, “Charlie's Welcome,” pairs with the duo's slip jig treatment of the traditional English carol “I Saw Three Ships.” On the rousing tip is the one-two punch of Katherine Davis's “The Little Drummer Boy” and the Appalachian song “Breakin' up Christmas.” The medieval plainchant melody “Divinum Mysterium” is given a dignified treatment, the performance the closest the release gets to formal classical. After the traditional English carol “The Cherry Tree Carol” arrests the ear, Ciccone's “The Back of Winter” captivates with one of the album's loveliest tunes—its little hiccup alone enough to bring a tear. At album's close, “L'Abbiamo,” a touching waltz Ciccone wrote for her father, segues into Saint Alphonsus Liguori's Italian carol “Tu Scendi Dalle Stelle.”

January 2025