Blas:Piping Concert

7 Sep 2007 in Festival, Highland, Music

Inverness Town House, 5 September 2007

Ashleigh Bell.

THE FIRST of two bagpipe-centred events at this year’s festival – prior to the following night’s tribute show for the late Gordon Duncan at Tulloch Castle – this one-off Blas concert focused on the great Highland pipes, as wielded by two of the instrument’s greatest contemporary exponents, Angus MacDonald and Duncan MacGillivray, along with one of its brightest rising stars, Ashleigh Bell.

Bell, whose recent competition wins include the Gold Medal at last year’s Cowal Highland gathering and the Scottish Junior Championships at Carnoustie, is a willowy slip of a thing who looks as far from the customary image of a Highland piper as it’s possible to imagine.

Which didn’t stop her opening and closing the proceedings with admirable assurance and panache, despite her pipes displaying a certain amount of traditional temperament in matters of tuning and timbre. Clean, crisp articulation and solidly measured rhythms were balanced with flowing momentum and a vivacious lightness of touch, creating plenty of space for nimble ornamentation.

“Oh, to be young again and have fingers like that,” enthused Rona Lightfoot, the evening’s MC, who – as one of Scotland’s pioneering female pipers – must have derived a particular satisfaction from seeing the torch so securely passed on.

Both of the programme’s remaining performers are famed not only for their numerous premier-league successes across the competition circuit, but for their wider vanguard contributions to Scotland’s music in expanding the bagpipes’ repertoire and popularising them with new audiences.

As a member of the Battlefield Band from 1978 until 1983, Duncan MacGillivray was among the earliest pipers to appear in a folk-group context, and remains an inspirational figure to many a young player today.

His choice of material, including such venerable tunes as ‘The Battle of Harlaw’ and others sourced from numerous different name-checked localities, conveyed a potent sense of the bagpipes’ intricately-woven relationship with Highland history and landscapes, enhanced by his playing’s implacable muscularity, majestic stateliness and buoyant rhythmic lift.

The World War I lament ‘Festubert’, meanwhile, commemorating a battle in which two of MacGillivray’s great-uncles died, highlighted the instrument’s timeless capacity for capturing the inexpressible.

As ever, an especially warm welcome was reserved for Dr Angus MacDonald, the eldest of Glenuig’s celebrated fraternal triumvirate, and – as original co-instigator of the Fèis movement, from its earliest beginnings in Barra in 1981 – arguably deserving of substantial credit for Blas’s very existence.

He underscored his musical allegiance to both past and present with a set featuring contemporary compositions from well beyond the conventional piping repertoire, including tunes by fiddlers Jerry Douglas, from Cape Breton, and Chicago’s Liz Carroll, as well as a stirring tribute to the legendary bard Ruraidh Dall – who, MacDonald observed, would surely be rolling in his grave at the sight of Elton John adorning the Highland 2007 brochure: a comment that earned some of the night’s warmest applause.

The mighty power and awesome technical fluency of MacDonald’s playing were allied with an unerring grasp of each tune’s overall shape and movement, as well as utmost sensitivity to colour and harmony. It seemed a shame not to hear all three players together, which would have made a fitting finale to the show, but there was certainly no quibbling with their individual performances.

© Sue Wilson, 2007

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