Aidan O’Rourke curates a folk music weekend at the Lemon Tree looking to the land and sea.
When: Friday 5 - Saturday 6 February 2027
Where: Lemon Tree
Tickets: All Delve 2027 events
Aberdeen Performing Arts has announced the programme for Delve, its folk and trad festival, now in its fifth year. It’s a tasty line-up but Saturday’s evening concert is the one not to miss. Singer-songwriter Beth Orton and Sam Amidon, who reimagines folk songs, share the bill with experimental fiddler Hans P. Kjorstad from Norway, and the evening mixes individual performances, duets and one-off collaborations created for the weekend.
O’Rourke opens the festival on Friday alongside Skye piper Brìghde Chaimbeul, Dublin fiddler Aoife Ní Bhriain and Kerry concertina player Cormac Begley. The four perform together and explore memory and music that travels on the tide.
Where the title comes from
Eem is what folk here in the North East call the low sea haze that makes it hard to tell where the water stops and the sky starts. The other half of the title is the tide, a metaphor for the constant back and forth of ideas and traditions.
The festival looks out from Scotland and treats the water as a link to Norway, Ireland, America and beyond. The line-up mixes musicians and writers who are rooted in tradition.
Don’t skip the smaller events
Saturday starts with a fiddle workshop led by fiddler and composer O’Rourke. Bothy ballad singer Scott Gardiner and vocal trio Tripple follow after lunch with The Port City Ballads, a relaxed lunchtime set about North East ports and fishing communities, and about migration.
Aberdeen-born guitarist Graeme Stephen, who plays free improvised jazz and Scottish folk among other styles, performs his original live score to Buster Keaton’s 1924 slapstick silent film The Navigator, with string players Fiona Winning and Naomi Pavri. The score brings contemporary jazz to the comedy.
Malachy Tallack, an author and musician (That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz), leads a conversation about coastal landscapes and identity with nature writer Cal Flyn (Islands of Abandonment) and writer and photographer Christina Riley. They discuss how the sea, wildness and the underwater world shape creative work.
Across the two nights, Delve moves through fiddle, piping and concertina from Skye, Dublin and Kerry, bothy ballads from the North East coast, a jazz score for a silent film, and a headline set that folds in American and Norwegian folk. That spread makes it a good way into trad music, whether you know the scene or you’re coming to it cold.
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