Music / 2025 National Folk Festival. At EPIC, until April 21. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

I’ve long been a fellow traveller at this event. Perhaps it’s genetic.

My paternal grandfather clearly had a band in NZ early in the 20th century. In a faded group photo there’s two concertinas, a tin whistle player, a violin, and him in the centre on the banjo on someone’s verandah. Clearly folk.

The definition’s much broader these days, with a multitude of ethnicities finding room and The National providing five days of enthusiastic sharing, seeing, dancing, singing, playing and listening.

This year’s event feels a little pared down from previous years. The stalls seem fewer, the layout of the event sparser. It’s a bit dearer to eat and drink and I am grumbling that I haven’t been able to find any Thai. But the atmosphere has not disappeared.

The streets roll with processions, particularly toward evening, and the spaces outside the venues host everything from lively children’s orchestras to dance groups to African drumming. You might find a gamelan orchestra and Balinese dancing. On one day there was a temporary maypole and a mass of Morris dancers have been around every day.

Even if you have come with a clear performing or learning focus you need to accept you can’t get to everything and this year is as various as ever. There are classes and workshops on everything from the pipes to strings to percussion. Jamming takes place notably at the Sessions Bar. The streets ring with tunes and beats.

Once acceptance arrives a kind of drifting can set in. Or there’s the phenomenon of heading for one thing and finding another. I went towards the Marquee intending some Balinese but swerved into the Flute and Fiddle and stayed because of the marvellous Islander music rolling out of that tent.

Venues can be crowded. Sometimes in the case of the smaller venues you can find yourself perched at the entrance. But if the music is good you’ll stay. You actually might have to plan ahead, which is why you’ll see people crouched over the hugely informative program book. Of course you can do this on line these days but many old hands seem to prefer the tactile to the ethereal and as someone working at the box office said to me, “I save mine…”. It’s a souvenir.

When all else fails the folk fest dilettante, you make for the Budawang. It’s a huge space, once used as the National Tally room. There’s a big screen either side of the stage where a video interpretation of what’s going on on stage plays. It helps to see a lot of performance and playing detail up close.

You soon get used to the eccentric theatre lighting that favours lots of moving fixtures and weird primary colours and a bit of smoke to make the beams of light stand out. But there’s generally a sensitivity to mood and an awareness that, in certain acts, the space in front of the stage is going to be full of people dancing. Moving lights take care of that and the mood is exhilarating.

The whole event of The National is a sea of music and performance that can be overwhelming but settle to the fact that you’ll never see it all and enjoy what you do see. I think Grandad McLean would be surprised, but well pleased.