The Devil's Violin Company's latest CD has arrived and will be available to purchase within the next week. The CD is a recording of their successful show The Singing Bones and includes instrumentals alongside storytelling and music.

A link will be added here when the CD is available for purchase.

Oliver Wilson-Dickson's violin playing will feature in the soundtrack soundtrack for a major new dramatisation of Vassily Grossman's epic novel Life and Fate, starring Kenneth Branagh.

Produced by Alison Hindell, BBC Head of Audio Drama, the dramatisation will take over every drama slot (except for The Archers) on BBC Radio 4 during a week from 18th September 2011, with several events planned to coincide with the broadcasts.

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The BBC Radio 3 Stage in WOMAD was jumping last Friday afternoon when Jamie Smith's Mabon played their debut concert at this fabulous festival. You can hear highlights from the performance on no less than four radio shows this week, some of which also feature interviews with Jamie:

- Listen again to last Saturday's "Womad Live" on BBC Radio 3 at about 2 hrs 16 min in( http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b012whh6 )
- Check out BBC Radio Scotland's 'Global Gathering' tonight (Tuesday 2nd August) after the news at 8pm

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VARIETY, ENERGY & EXCITEMENT
The start of this highly anticipated set by much talked-about Jamie Smith's Mabon was held up for a few minutes so that they could be presented with their trophy for winning the Best Instrumental Album category in the annual Spiral Earth Folk Awards.

Daniel Morden will be talking to Ian MacMillan on BBC Radio 3's 'The Verb' at 10pm this Friday. He will tell a short section from Sleeping Beauty and discuss the show.

www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/theverb

www.fiddle.org.uk/sleepingbeauty

Three dates this week:

17 Turner Sims Concert Hall, Southampton 8pm
http://www.turnersims.co.uk/ 023 8059 5151

18 The Plough Arts Centre, Torrington 8pm
http://www.theploughartscentre.org.uk/ 01805 624624

19  - Glasbury Village Hall 7.30pm
http://www.glasburyart.co.uk/ 01497 847426

See you there!

'...a dark and haunting beauty to this music...' 
LONDON EVENING STANDARD
'...I'm blown away, one of the best voices I've ever heard in my entire life...' 
CELTIC HEARTBEAT
'...A haunting mix of heartfelt balladry and folkish flair...!'
BBC ONLINE

The popular acoustic music website Spiral Earth has shortlisted Mabon's live album 'Live at the Grand Pavilion', for best instrumental album of 2010. The album has had a number of excellent reviews and has also been included in a BBC compilation of Celtic music.

You can vote for Mabon by following the link below:

http://www.spiralearth.co.uk/spiralawards2011/instrumental.asp

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Further to this story I am pleased to say that Mabon won!

Somerset County Council will be considering a proposal to cut the arts budget by 100% at their cabinet meeting on Monday 1st November at Somerset College and the public is being asked to support the county’s arts organisations as they campaign against the decision.

Arts organisations across Somerset accept that measures to make savings are needed but believe that the arts budget should take a 26% cut in line with overall cuts in local authority spending.

I once did a concert in a village in North Wales where the organiser said that Rural Touring had utterly transformed his area. "This used to be a place where people just lived" he said "but since we have had performances through Rural Touring it has become a community". The full implications of the recently announced cuts are slowly revealing themselves across every part of society and Rural Touring looks set to be another tragic casualty.

Fabula storytelling festival takes place over a weekend in the heart of Sweden's capital city, Stockholm. The roster of artists included the fantastically entertaining Clare Murphy (Ireland) and Ma Xiaolon, one of the last practitioners of a thousand year old tradition of storytelling in the teahouses of Yangtzou, China. We (The Devil's Violin Company) performed both a shortened version of our previous show, The Devil's Violin, as well as a full performance of the Singing Bones.