Phipps Hall, Beauly, Wednesday 7 April 2004

Kevin Burke

‘I HOPE YOU like fiddle music,’ Kevin Burke deadpanned at the opening of a wonderful informal concert, ‘or you’re in for a long night.’ Burke is best known for his work with bands like The Bothy Band, Patrick Street, his own Open House and the Celtic Fiddle Festival (in which he played with the late Johnny Cunningham), but this one-off Scottish date provided a rare opportunity to catch him playing not only completely solo, but entirely acoustically in the smaller Ceilidh Room in the Phipps Hall.

Adrian Clark, the Arts Officer for Inverness area and the man who made this opportunity possible, opted for the smaller room on the basis of slow advance sales, and ended up shoe-horning a near capacity crowd into the space. Burke played standing up with no frills and no lighting, but the intimacy and close proximity of the venue added greatly to the occasion, as did the natural warmth and sonority of the unamplified instrument. It provided a glorious opportunity to enjoy the refinements of his style and the intricacies of his ornamentation in their purest form, all delivered with his trademark spirit and expressiveness.

Burke was born in London and lives in Oregon, but his musical roots lie in the Sligo style of Irish fiddle playing, albeit with additional borrowings from a whole range of other styles. The vast majority of the tune sets drew on Irish material, with occasional digressions into the music of Brittany and Quebec, and a Yiddish tune he learned from musicians in Scandinavia, and later discovered its name in Alaska from a doctor who collected Yiddish sheet music (it’s a long story).

Jigs and reels naturally featured heavily, including a lovely set drawn from the playing of the great Sligo fiddler Michael Coleman, but he also played a set of the exuberant slides and polkas from the Sliabh Luachra region in each half of the concert, along with the mock-Baroque pastiche of Carolan’s Concerto, written by the great Irish harpist Turloch Carolan (1670-1738) in a playful send up of the then new and very fashionable (in Scotland as well as Ireland) Italian music of Geminiani and Corelli.

It was all wonderful stuff, beautifully played in a relaxed and flowing fashion that belied the virtuosity behind the music. His droll asides and introductions all added to the informal air of the recital, but it was impossible to avoid the sense that we were being treated to a rare privilege from a genuine master.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2004