Dréos

The 2020 Samhain Celtic New Year Festival is excited to welcome Dréos!

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Dréos is a Celtic ensemble of performing composers who create new music and reimagine old music using a traditional vocabulary. Combining the blazing piping of Eliot Grasso, virtuosic fiddling of Brandon Vance, and powerhouse accompaniment of Glen Waddell, Dréos offers listeners exciting, handcrafted music in a living tradition, and brings audiences and students into a centuries-old cultural-artistic dialogue. Dréos has been engaging listeners in North America and in Europe since its inception.

The word “Dréos” comes from Scottish Gaelic and translates into the English word “blaze” with the idea that it is light that helps us see the past, present, and future, and that it is the warmth of musical performance around which we gather for community and dialogue.

Dréos’s debut recording, The Clearing (2015), was hailed by New York’s Irish Echo as “a taut, accomplished work that plays at the crossroads between Irish and Scottish music” and was named one of the top ten recordings by Folk, World & Roots Music in the year of its release. Their second album, The Odyssey of These Days, a recording of original chamber music written in response to the abstract paintings of artist Wesley  Hurd, was recognized by the Oregon Arts Commission with an Artist Fellowship in 2017. Having performed for the William Kennedy Piping Festival in Armagh, U.K., the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, Ireland, the World Music Series, University of Oregon, Northwest Folklife Festival, Seattle, and points beyond, Dréos offers compelling music, live and recorded.