Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 20 January 2008

Altan (photo - Celtic Connections)

MERGERS BETWEEN traditional and orchestral music have a somewhat uneven contemporary track-record, but this Celtic Connections programme offered at least three guarantors of quality.

It opened with Shaun Davey’s landmark 1980 work The Brendan Voyage – generally rated among the most successful such cross-genre compositions – featuring its original soloist, the great uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn, while the second half saw top Irish traditional band Altan retaining the orchestra’s services to accompany them in large-scale arrangements of favourite tunes and songs from their repertoire, by composer Fiachra Trench.

The orchestra on this occasion was that of Scottish Opera, performing under the energetic baton of David Brophy, recently appointed as Principal Conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.

For those unfamiliar with Davey’s opus, The Brendan Voyage was inspired by a modern-day recreation of the epic transatlantic crossing that was undertaken, according to Irish legend, by the monk St Brendan around 500AD, sailing in a leather-hulled curragh via Scotland, the Faeroes and Iceland.

Using the pipes to represent the tiny boat and its crew, while the orchestra stands in for the mighty seas, raging tempests, icebergs, fog and whales encountered en route, the piece creates a marvellously dramatic, vividly impressionistic aural narrative of the adventure, rendered here with tremendous vigour, colour and flourish by all concerned.

As ever, O’Flynn’s masterly playing was a privilege to hear, vying thrillingly with the orchestra in the music’s stormier passages, elsewhere calming the waters with some spinetingling slower solos.

Altan had chosen mainly vocal material for orchestration, a bias that at times seemed somewhat ill-judged given the ethereal spun-glass fragility of Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh’s singing: a decidedly unequal match for a 50-piece orchestra, despite the subtlety and restraint with which Trench’s arrangements embellished the songs’ melodies and cadences.
Blissfully lush and gracefully configured as the overall sound was, a bit more flexing of the massed ensemble’s muscle would have been welcome, especially after the sturm und drang splendour of the first half. The two explosive instrumentals that did feature, at either end of the set, only heightened this feeling – not least given how clearly the orchestra relished letting their hair down.

Tapping their feet and everything, some of them were, while Brophy was jigging and jumping around in a most un-conductorly fashion.

© Sue Wilson, 2008

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