City Halls, Glasgow, 26 January 2008

Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas

FEATURING two of Scotland’s greatest instrumental talents, on fiddle and guitar respectively, this Celtic Connections show saw one-time duo partners Alasdair Fraser and Tony McManus each hosting their own section of the proceedings – although they had a tune together at the start just for old times’ sake.

McManus’s set largely featured material commissioned for a concert last year by the Nashville Chamber Orchestra, with Grammy-winning arranger Don Hart having scored a selection of his repertoire for string quartet and bass. The latter instrument – in a five-string fretless version – was wielded here by McManus’s longtime French collaborator Alain Genty, while the line-up was completed by two more of his old musical muckers, US singer and multi-instrumentalist Bruce Molsky, and Scottish percussionist Guy Nicolson on tablas.

McManus’s sensitive renderings of Scottish and international folk tunes were as prodigiously nimble-fingered as ever, and Hart’s imaginative string arrangements proved to be a model of their kind, fleshing out the sound with plenty of snap and swing as well as lush extra colour. Unfortunately, however, this very vigour on the quartet’s part tended to drown out McManus’s playing in the faster medleys, sacrificing the subtleties of nuance and ornamentation for which he’s justly renowned.

Other numbers saw McManus trying out his latest new toy, a custom-made guitar designed to mimic the distinctive zinging reverb of the Indian sitar. Here the experiment sounded interesting but only partially successful, the instrument’s exotic tones and colours meshing somewhat unmelodiously with the material.

Fraser appeared in his favoured current pairing with the young American cellist Natalie Haas, continuing to pursue their resurrection and reinvention of the classic musical marriage between big and small fiddles, a familiar feature of Scottish music in the 18th century. The duo’s near-telepathic interplay was dazzling both for its breathtaking technical prowess and its boundless dynamism, be it in tunes from that same golden era, the age of Burns and Gow, or Fraser’s own memorable compositions.

The only major fly in the evening’s ointment was an entirely superfluous opening set from the Swedish quartet Oleman. The concert was part of Celtic Connections’ Showcase Scotland programme, in which Sweden were the international partner this year, presenting a handful of their own acts to the assembled delegates over the weekend.

Someone’s quality control had seriously fallen down in the case of Oleman, whose combination of fiddle, accordion, guitar, flute and vocals produced versions of traditional songs and tunes that were polite, inoffensive and almost entirely forgettable. Shoehorning them onto the bill also skewed the rest of the evening, with the first half lasting over ninety minutes, and the show as a whole – especially in an oppressively overheated hall – ending up decidedly too long.

© Sue Wilson, 2008

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• Celtic Connections