By Glenn Rifkin

“My goal is to play these wonderful venues and also be close to home so I can have time in the morning with my daughter. I marvel at living in New England.”

If you’re a fan of Boston’s vibrant Celtic music scene, you’ve almost certainly seen Hanneke Cassel perform. Cassel, an award-winning Scottish and Cape Breton-style fiddler and composer, has been a featured local solo artist and ensemble player for more than two decades. With her luxurious red hair, broad smile, and passionate style, she has graced stages for Brian O’Donovan’s Christmas Celtic Sojourn, the fiddle band Childsplay, and the local fiddle scene at Irish pubs like The Burren in Somerville and at favored venues like Club Passim. A Berklee College of Music graduate, she has toured around the globe and recorded six solo albums including her most recent, Infinite Brightness, released in 2023.

For this brief (three stop) tour around the Boston area, Cassel is performing with her long-time pianist Dave Wiesler, who has been a fixture on her albums. They will be joined by Celtic guitarists Keith Murphy and Yann Faquet.

For Cassel, a native of Port Oxford, Oregon, music was a birthright. Her mother, a piano teacher, got her started at the keyboard at age three. But it was her introduction to the violin as an eight-year old that hooked her. She embraced the local Texas-style fiddle contest scene and discovered that her talent was blue-ribbon real. She began to enter and win contests and won a scholarship to a fiddle camp on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, where she studied under legendary Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser. That week-long experience cemented her love and commitment to the genre. She and her husband, cellist Mike Block, live in Somerville with their five-year old daughter. She spoke to Arts Fuse about her upcoming tour.

Note: Hanneke Cassel with Dave Wiesel along with Keith Murphy and Yann Faquet will perform at the Shalin Liu Performance Center, Rockport, MA, on November 15 at  8 p.m.; at the James Library, Norwell, MA, on November 16 at 7:30 p.m.; and at the Groton Hill Music Center, Groton, MA at November 17 at 7 p.m.

Arts Fuse: Tell me about this tour.

Hanneke Cassel: I usually perform as part of a trio with guitar and cello. But this is different because I’m doing this one with Dave Wiesler. We met in 1999 at a Scottish dance camp called Pinewoods in Plymouth and began to collaborate. He has recorded on almost all my albums. But he doesn’t live around here so touring together has been complicated. We haven’t done a lot of shows together. I really wanted to play some more shows with him because we have all these great venues around Massachusetts, incredible rooms with pianos. I reached out to Groton Hill Music Center with the idea and we agreed it would be even better if we had another duo with us. My very good friends Keith Murphy and Yann Faquet, with their guitars and songs, make this a really nice pairing.

Award-winning Scottish and Cape Breton-style fiddler and composer Hanneke Cassell. Photo: courtesy of the artist

AF: So it’s a bit of a reunion?

Cassel: They are some of my favorite people to play with. I’ve performed and recorded with all three of these guys and I’m excited to do something a bit different. I can play some of the tunes from my albums that I never perform because they are so piano-centric. About 25 to 30 percent of my albums have lush fiddle/piano tracks. I just don’t perform them because they really need a piano. So here, I’ll be performing tunes I’ve recorded over the past 15 to 20 years that I haven’t performed a lot.

AF: How is the piano different from the fiddle in terms of your songs?

Cassel: Most of the material I perform are my original compositions. A lot of the tunes I perform with the piano I actually wrote on the piano. There’s a slightly lusher tone. They are a little less raw, more polished, tending toward classical, to a sound that draws strongly from the Scottish country dancing tradition. Scottish country dancing has this slightly more full, elegant sound. It’s Scottish Highlands or Cape Breton music versus that in-the-kitchen, jamming, step-dancing kind of dirtier fun sounds.

AF: So Dave Wiesler brings that fuller sound.

Cassel: He’s an incredible pianist. There’s a tune I wrote a couple of albums ago called “Epic and Triumphant.” I feel like that sometimes when I’m playing with Dave. It’s a very epic sound.

AF: Your background is also in piano.

Cassell: I started with the piano first. My mom is a retired piano teacher. I never studied piano as seriously as I did violin. There are things I can’t do technically on the piano because I didn’t put in the time. On the other hand, I just love to play the piano. There’s nothing stressful about it. I never felt I had to practice. I spent my tune-writing time with the piano, playing, singing tunes, melodies, as I’m composing.

AF: Where did the love of this music come from?

Cassel: I grew up in Oregon and played a couple of years of classical violin, but then my teacher moved away. So I started playing Texas style fiddle. It’s an American style and there’s a big contest scene in the Northwest associated with it. I competed in lots of contests. I started working with a new teacher just as she got into Scottish music. She had met the great Scottish fiddle player Alasdair Fraser and she encouraged me to play Scottish music. I resisted. I was 12 and I wanted to keep playing what I’d been playing. She persisted and taught me some Scottish tunes and I ended up winning a contest and a scholarship to study with Alasdair Fraser on the Isle of Skye for a week. I studied with Fraser and Buddy MacMaster, my favorite Cape Breton fiddle player. I went to that workshop for a few years in a row and totally switched over to Scottish/Cape Breton music. I got swept up in it.

AF: This tour is very local.

Cassel: Having a family and trying to balance traveling and performance is hard. We are so blessed to have a bunch of incredible venues within an hour and a half of Boston. I can play in New Hampshire, or Maine or Rhode Island and sleep in my own bed at night. My goal is to play these wonderful venues and also be close to home so I can have time in the morning with my daughter. I marvel at living in New England.

Glenn Rifkin is a veteran journalist and author who has covered business for many publications including the New York Times for nearly 35 years. He has written about music, film, theater, food and books for the Arts Fuse. His book Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire was published by McGraw-Hill.