Lisa Moscatiello and Rosie Shipley, Well Kept Secrets (Shipwhistle Productions, 2003)
One of the things I love most about Celtic music is the feeling I have that I could spend the next 50 years exploring its mighty currents, its eddying backwaters, and off-branching tributaries, and still manage to find something new and delightful around every bend and behind every rock and beyond every hill. It's discs like Well Kept Secrets that give me this feeling.
Here is a disc by two performers of whom I've never heard before, Lisa Moscatiello and Rosie Shipley. And that's it: just Mosciatello and Shipley. No background band, no synthesized strings or lush orchestra, no percussionists or whistle-players or pipers listed in the credits but not pictured. The music on Well Kept Secrets is produced by just these two women, with Mosciatello playing the guitar and providing the vocals while Shipley puts her bow to the fiddle. The result is a wonderfully clean and pure sound with an atmosphere of improvisation, as though these two women met one day and, finding that both were musicians, immediately went to an empty place with perfect acoustics and laid down these 10 tracks.
Shipley's fiddle is the first sound heard on the disc, with Moscatiello joining in moments later on a set of reels that are played with sprightly abandon. The disc takes a sharp turn into the meditative on the second track, a wonderful ballad called "Here's a Health to All True Lovers" (which, the liner notes inform us, contains a coded reference to the supernatural in the lyrics; let that be a lesson to all ye who don't read the liner notes). Mosciatello's voice is a husky contralto, and as such is perfectly suited to the ballads and songs offered here. I particularly enjoyed the Quebecois song "Mon Cher Amant," which Mosciatello sings in sultry French (a translation of the lyrics is provided).
Well Kept Secrets provides a fine reminder that one does not need the forces of an entire symphony orchestra, or even a small band with electric amplification, for great music-making. In fact, were I to name a single fault with this disc, it would be the running time, which clocks in at under 40 minutes. I'd gladly listen to twice the amount of music presented here, and I look forward to hearing further collaborations between Lisa Mosciatello and Rosie Shipley.
