The Endiang Hall was full of lively, foot-stomping fiddling on Sunday, Dec. 14, as the Calgary Fiddlers fiddled their way into the community.
With a hall full of people from all over the area in house to enjoy the music, the Fiddlers put on a show that delighted all.
The group of teenagers range in age from 14-18 and are all from schools in Calgary or the surrounding area. They perform roughly 100 gigs a year, plus additional tours in Canada, the United States, and Europe.
The fiddlers were a striking sight in their black shirts and slacks, or in the case of most girls, bright red kilts. To celebrate the season, they mostly wore Santa Cowboy hats.
The crowd frequently got into the music, which ranged from energetic jigs and reels to more sedate waltzes. With Christmas just around the corner, the fiddlers also played several traditional Christmas carols as well.
The group, which recently was recorded playing in Banff for play on the Australian Today Show, a morning news and entertainment program, repeated the performance of the song Traveller for the audience, who received it with warm applause.
Korri Spruit, one of the teen fiddlers, has been playing with the group for two years. She plays the standup bass.
“It was pretty cool filming at Banff Springs,” she said. Since joining, she’s had opportunity to see parts of Canada she would have otherwise not been able to see, like New Brunswick, she noted.
And the fiddlers – a group that has seen changing members over the three decades the group has existed – has let her meet other musically minded individuals, since they all come from various schools and parts of the city or surrounding communities.
“I would have never had a chance to meet some of these people,” she noted.
The camaraderie between the players was obvious as they joked around on stage, dancing and playing off each other much to the delight of the crowd.
While at times the smiles seemed fixed on their faces, most often the signs of happiness and pleasure were genuine, not performance, and the music was pitch-perfect.