Strathclyde Suite, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 25 January 2008

Annie Grace, Corrina Hewat and Karine Polwart

ANNIE GRACE, Corrina Hewat and Karine Polwart first discovered their rare vocal chemistry working together on projects like Scottish Women and The Unusual Suspects. Mistresses of harmony all, they made their official debut as a trio with this Burns Night appearance at Celtic Connections, after a rapturous response to their previous handful of low-key gigs. The sold-out show represented a resplendent home-grown contribution to the “voices of the world” theme at this year’s festival.

While all three are instrumentalists as well as singers – Grace on whistles and pipes, Hewat on harp and Polwart on guitar – the new project’s emphasis is firmly on the vocals. Most of the songs’ arrangements were a capella, with only the subtlest of accompaniment deployed elsewhere.

The group’s collective breadth of tastes and specialisms makes for a sparklingly diverse repertoire, here ranging from Burns songs aplenty – given the date – to two of Hewat’s own; vintage country and pop to vocalised piobaireachd. Describing the trio as an essentially light-hearted diversion from each member’s busy individual career, Polwart said that a secondary aim was to counter the often well-founded perception of female folk-singers as “hardcore miserable so-and-sos” – hence the inclusion among the Burns material, for instance, of several Scots dance songs, a lively Lowland counterpart to Gaelic puirt-a-beul, several highlighting the bard’s bawdier side.

Tongues were also firmly in cheeks as Polwart introduced a set of “walking songs” – not the Gaelic (waulking) variety but a showstopping medley spliced together from ‘Walk the Line’, ‘Walking Back to Happiness’, ‘Walk Tall’ and the like.

Adroit as the choice of material was, though, these three could have sung the proverbial phone-book and brought the house down, such was the dazzling artistry of their arrangements, both harmonically and structurally, the three voices intricately overlapping and intercutting within each song amidst a kaleidoscope of radiant aural colour.

Canadian singer-songwriter Maria Dunn has made one album to date, 2004’s We Were Good People, based on real-life stories of working-class folk from the history of her native Alberta. A diminutively gamine figure, she nonetheless proved an impressively assured performer, smoothly linking the songs with spoken-word narrative interludes. Her songwriting style drew deftly on classic Celtic and North American ballad idioms while her clear, artfully understated singing conjured character and drama with winning immediacy.

© Sue Wilson, 2008

Links

• Celtic Connections