Various venues, 5-13 September 2008

The MacDonald Brothers

Launched in 2005, the Blas festival is still a youngster by folk-scene standards, but the success of this year’s fourth programme clearly attests to its impressive strategic maturity. Even the barest logistical sketch of that programme would send most event planners running for the hills – or maybe away from them, in this case: 45 concerts over nine days, in almost as many different venues, scattered throughout the Gàidhealtachd from Durness to Kingussie, Wick to Glenuig.

That amounts to upwards of 200 individual performers, inbound from Canada, Ireland and England as well as all points Scottish, to be scheduled and transported, fed and accommodated, publicised and ticketed, provided with technical crew and PA kit, all jigsawed together across an area roughly the size of Belgium.

This awesome organisational feat is made possible by Blas’s parent partnership between the Highland Council, Fèisean nan Gàidheal and the Promoters Arts Network, with the latter two bodies, in particular, providing the backbone of local volunteers who run most of the gigs in conjunction with the festival’s co-directors, Brian Ó hEadhra and Donna MacRae.

While the bulk of the programme takes place in small rural halls – it being a founding Blas principle that Inverness doesn’t hog the limelight – this year also saw the festival’s first shows at the refurbished Eden Court theatre, as well as combined dinner/concert packages on both the Loch Ness cruiser Jacobite Queen, and a vintage steam-train chugging through the Cairngorms.

Also new for 2008 was an extensive education programme, additionally funded by the Highland Council, and the presence of a BBC TV crew, filming four concerts for broadcast on the new Gaelic digital channel. Overall ticket sales were well up on last year, with over half the shows selling out completely.

Blas’s primary artistic brief is the promotion of Highland and Gaelic culture, but with both being such a pervasive and vital presence within Scottish and/or Celtic music at large, this provides naturally for ample diversity in the line-up. With Scottish acts outnumbering international visitors by roughly five to one, though, this year’s bill vividly highlighted the stunning variety and calibre of music currently being made on our home-grown folk scene.

Two nicely contrasting instances of this were offered by a concert featuring the fabled MacDonald piping brothers of Glenuig, and by this year’s festival commission, Chasing the Sun, an hour-long ensemble suite composed by the young Wick pianist James Ross. In addition to their musical content, both also exemplified how Blas’s location and physical resources can contribute to a magically distinctive atmosphere.

The MacDonalds, for instance, took the stage in the loftily imposing yet intimate Great Hall of Dingwall’s Tulloch Castle Hotel, whose wood-panelled walls must surely be steeped in centuries of pipe and fiddle music. Performing mainly in trio formation, Angus, Allan and Iain delivered a magisterial display not only of the bravura technical prowess that’s made them such a tripartite byword for classic West Highland piping, but also of the inventiveness and imagination, in both their choice and interpretation of material, with which they uphold a living tradition.

Tunes rediscovered in dusty old collections sat alongside numerous fine original compositions – the latter being “made” rather than “written”, in the brothers’ preferred parlance, as in the Gaelic – with the pipes’ redoubtable force superbly tempered by radiant, cascading harmonies and intricately dovetailed ornamentation.

Besides Ross on piano, Chasing the Sun featured Scotland’s favourite nonconformist string quartet, Mr McFall’s Chamber, with Fraser Fifield completing the line-up on soprano sax, smallpipes and low whistle. Ross conceived the work as representing a journey along the north coast of Caithness and Sutherland, encompassing the twin motif of the sun’s diurnal and annual passage through the sky. Complementing the music was a collaboratively devised photographic backdrop by Sutherland-based artist Catriona Murray, potently capturing the region’s stark, rugged grandeur in its subtle gradations of light from dawn to dusk, winter to summer, and back again.

The duality of timelessness and constant change embodied by the sun’s progress – and equally inherent in the sea’s tidal motion, the patterns of the weather, or the journey from birth to death – was ingeniously articulated in the cyclical structures of Ross’s gorgeously melodic writing.

Each of the six short movements led us on an individual journey, shifting fluently through tempos, time signatures and moods, adding and subtracting layers of instrumentation, colour and texture. With subtle prompting from Murray’s images, the music’s alternating passages of tranquillity and turbulence, sadness and exultation, vividly conjured such splendours as a winter storm and a summer sunset; the quickening of spring or the majesty of the Northern Lights.

Deftly interwoven with traditional tune forms like marches, strathspeys and reels, the music completed its own journey with a hauntingly poignant lament, eerily evocative of the human toll exacted by this unforgiving coastline over the centuries.

My rapt enjoyment was again enhanced by the concert’s setting – in this instance, the Resolis Memorial Hall on the Black Isle, which is out of the way even by Highland standards (hence the show’s somewhat late start, after Ross got lost en route.) Not a frequent port of call, one imagines, for the piano-hire company who supplied the baby grand – but then Achiltibuie and Wick, where the piece had premiered the previous two nights, probably aren’t on their regular route either.

Thus does Blas give new meaning(s) to the notion of going the extra mile. It’s a rare treat in itself to witness the nativity of a wonderful new work, but to do so this far from anything resembling a madding crowd, in a cosy candlelit hall – and with local cheese and oatcakes on offer at the interval – made it all the rarer still.

The biggest event on this year’s bill, by various official measurements – not least a jam-packed capacity crowd – was Wednesday’s Eden Court show featuring Irish veterans The Chieftains. Given the status they still enjoy, it was indubitably something of a coup for Blas to bring these one-time seminal pioneers to the Highlands, where they hadn’t played for some 25 years.

There’s equally no denying, however, that they’re essentially a spent force nowadays, with the arguable exception of flute player Matt Molloy – who was absent on this occasion due to family illness. This left only three Chieftains proper – frontman Paddy Moloney on uilleann pipes and whistles, fiddler Sean Keane and singer/bodhrán player Kevin Conneff – whose prevailingly undistinguished contributions were thankfully outweighed by a typically extensive supporting cast.

Continuing the successful “collaborative” formula that’s long been replicated on the band’s albums, the show was liberally bolstered by a seven-strong line-up of younger/hotter talent, including the Scottish contingent of Gaelic singer Alyth McCormack, Anna Massie on guitar and Brian McAlpine on piano, plus the brilliantly inventive harpist Triona Marshall and three sensational step-dancers, one of whom doubles as back-up to Keane on fiddle.

It all added up to a mighty fine night, but the actual Chieftains’ active share in this sum was pretty minimal. A decidedly more positive, infinitely less cynical face of folk music was presented by first-half performances from the teenage Gaelic choir Canntaireachd, singing sweetly harmonised arrangements of traditional and contemporary material, and Ross-shire youth group the Kiltearn Fiddlers, displaying the form that recently won them the ensemble prize at the International Eisteddfod in Wales.

Further development of budding talent was abundantly in evidence at Friday’s Ceòlraidh concert in Strathpeffer, which saw 14 young musicians from the Fèis Rois programme, aged from 13 to 18, performing in turn with their own choice of mentor, following a period of intensive rehearsal together. As is increasingly the case on such occasions, the skill and confidence of virtually all the participants, together with their fluent Gaelic introductions, inspiringly underlined the zeal with which many in this generation of Highlanders are embracing their cultural traditions.

The format of the show, too, which included the likes of Charlie McKerron, Arthur Cormack, Andy Thorburn and Alison Kinnaird in the mentoring role, was an explicit affirmation of the music’s traditional transmission routes down the generations – even if a modern-day apprenticeship also includes such newfangled stratagems as microphone technique and amplification technology.

Both the breadth and depth of Scotland’s contemporary folk music was underlined a final time at Farr Hall on Saturday, where the show opened with yet another terrific teenage line-up, this time the five-piece who’ve spent the summer plying the Caledonian Canal Ceilidh Trail. The bill continued with the thrillingly adventurous, genre-busting interplay between the accordion/fiddle duo of Angus Lyon and Ruaridh Campbell, then the hypnotically limpid Gaelic singing of Jenna Cumming, before rounding off with Fribo’s quirky, winsome blend of Scottish and Nordic influences. Not a bad night’s work, really, for one wee country.

© Sue Wilson, 2008

Links

• Blas Festival