Strathclyde Suite. Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, 17 January 2009

Siobhan Miller and Jeana Leslie

CLARSACHS were drawn up on one side of the stage like Viking galley prows as Findlay Napier, tutor and quondam student on the first RSAMD Scottish Traditional Music Course ten years ago, emerged to introduce this year’s crop of first years.

Good news for this clarsach aficionado, although it was well into the second half of the show before a clarsach moved to centre stage and Heather Downie, a double first last year and the only postgraduate student this year, delivered an assured, very impressive performance.

She is a credit to her tutor, the great Savourna Stevenson, with many an Eastern cadence and some interesting use of the levers to bend the notes. Bending the notes is evidently the new black, as the third year pipe trio, TNT, lived up to their name with an explosive set which did not so much bend the notes as twist them round and tie them in knots; Gordon Duncan and Martyn Bennett must be smiling, somewhere.

But back to the first years. Is it possible that the stars of today were once racked with nerves at the unfamiliar prospect of stepping up in front of an audience of strangers? It was a fascinating and instructive exercise to watch the difference that each year makes in the evolution of the tentative first year caterpillar into the confident fourth year butterfly.

Not that every year is the same; far from it, as Gillian Frame said in the interval; some years gel together in group work from the start, some arrive there eventually, some never do. She and the other tutors, Blazing Fiddles’ Ian MacFarlane and Professor Phil Cunningham among them, were backstage tuning instruments and onstage joining into performances in encouraging mode. No parent birds ever watched their fledglings on the edge of the nest with more anxious pride.

The second year groups showed that experience and practice, practice, practice are critical, as Angelica Jenkins on clarsach took the lead for her composition ‘Ella’s Tune’, which once again showed that the pairing with cello is a match made in heaven. Claire Hastings is blessed with confidence and a very fine voice, beautifully sustained, as is Paul McKenna, with a beguilingly warm, light, throaty tenor. The third years were the same only more so; the vocal groups namechecking Inverness’ Claire Campbell for their lovely Puirt a Beul set.

The fourth years finally assembled on the slipway, ready to launch. Catriona Watt’s song ‘Luinneag Mhicleoid’ and Fiona McCaskill’s ‘Epic Waltz’ impressed, the Soup Dragon set was indeed, as described, “smooth as ****”, but Siobhan Miller and Jeana Leslie were let down by the notoriously difficult sound in the Strathclyde Suite.

And finally, thanks for invaluable review assistance to Craig Muirhead, pupil, piper, and pianist – another name to watch.

© Jennie Macfie, 2009

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