By Imke Staats
It is actually quite telling that she came across her performance as a surprise during a pop festival. Cerys Hafana is from Wales and is a young person with short bleached hair who sometimes wears thick boots with long dresses. And who occasionally swaps her instrument, the Welsh triple harp, for a piano or electric guitar. In any case, she does not fit the stereotype of a classical harpist. And even though she deals with Welsh folk music, she does not necessarily preserve its tradition – something that some people accuse her of.
It was in September 2023 when the 20-year-old put her harp on the stage of the Resonzraum in Hamburg’s Feldstrassenbunker. This room is the home of the Ensemble Resonanz, a Hamburg string orchestra with a penchant for the avant-garde. Those who come here usually hear classical and new music; surprises are part of the concept. Since the concert was organized as part of the predominantly rock-pop Reeperbahn Festival, curiosity was all the greater. And she was rewarded with an almost magical atmosphere of warm, overlapping sounds and stories. Those that were plucked purely instrumentally from the three strings, and those that were sung in a foreign language. A red electric guitar was also used. The whole thing had an old-fashioned and artistically free, contemporary feel at the same time.
Cerys Hafana’s music is full of energy, her own enthusiasm is clearly palpable. The language with rolled Rs and throaty Ch sounds is Welsh, spoken by around 20 percent of people in Wales. Since hardly anyone in the audience understood her, the musician explained some of the lyrics in English, which revealed strange, funny, but also dark aspects. [ . . . ]
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