Catherine Strutt No Wind At The Window - Celtic and Gaelic Sacred Melodies CD

There is a quality in the music of the Celtic and Gaelic people that touches something deep inside us. It could be the home-spun folk rhythms that speak of good times with close friends. It could be the sound of a people who have been defined by dispossession, a sense of yearning for a homeland that can never be theirs. Or perhaps it is purely musical, a tradition whose core notes resound with the sound of the human spirit.

Catherine Strutt explores these themes on her new album, No Wind at the Window. Including well-known pieces like 'Amazing Grace', 'Abide With Me' and 'Morning Has Broken', to obscure tunes from a small Gaelic hymnbook from 1935, called simply An Laoidheadair (The Hymnal), given to Catherine by a friend as she embarked on this incredibly personal journey.

"For as long I can remember," says Catherine, "My mother has played the harmonium at the local Anglican church. It was there that I encountered the great tunes of the Welsh and English hymn writers, and from this first early exposure, the hymns tunes have been stored deep inside my memory, and never forgotten."

Catherine is considered to be one of the finest piano players of traditional Scottish dance music in the world today. She is well respected as an innovative and sensitive natural dance and concert musician and is a grapheme synaesthete, an individual who experiences numbers and letters in colour.

Using this phenomenon as a tool, Catherine plays and records entirely by ear. Her intuitive sense of rhythm and colour are incomparable and she continues to be an inspiration, teacher and mentor to many of Australia's Scottish-style pianists.