Paul Hutchinson and Karen Wimhurst to appear at Fordingbridge Folk Club

FOLK duo Paul Hutchinson and Karen Wimhurst are set to appear in Fordingbridge next month.

The pair came together through their love of traditional music blended with experimentation, boldness, humour and risk. Their first duo album Coracle received five-star reviews and saw them touring widely across UK and European festivals.

Both Paul and Karen are composers and improvisers, who have been collaborating and creating original music together for the past 20 years, as both a duo and as part of larger bands.

Paul is a BBC Folk Award Best Live Artist nominee with Belshazzar’s Feast, a much-feted accordion player and teacher. He is equally at home on the concert stage, playing dance tunes for enthusiastic revellers or running workshops.

Karen is a widely commissioned composer ranging from chamber works to music theatre and large-scale, collaborative productions. Eclectic in nature, her distinctive music manifests diverse traditional and jazz influences alongside a strong grounding in contemporary classical music.

Karen’s latest works include Synthetica, an online opera, and Heart of the Matter, a bijoux chamber opera for bass and piano which featured in the Tete a Tete opera festival 2024.

Karen was also one of the featured composers in the lockdown A Song For Us project and Jump, a solo work for clarinets, insect and amphibian sounds, which was showcased at a British Library event.

Event spokesperson Jill Lerner said: “Expect ethereal to turn gutsy, passion to be tempered by a good laugh and a tide of improvisation which means no two evenings are ever the same.”

Paul and Karen will be at Fordingbridge Folk Club on Friday 2nd May at 7.30pm. The club meets at Avonway Community Centre in Fordingbridge. Tickets are £10 on the door.