Piping Live!, St Andrew’s in the Square, Glasgow, 12 August 2009

Margaret Stewart

DEVISED by the renowned Glenuig piper and scholar Allan MacDonald, and staged as part of Glasgow’s sixth Piping Live! festival, this concert drew on his extensive researches into Highland music, presenting a succession of inter-related piobaireachds, slow airs and Gaelic laments, grouped by their association with particular clans and historical events.

As well as featuring the leading Gaelic singers Margaret Stewart and James Graham, MacDonald had defied what he referred to as “the Taliban of piobaireachd”, ie, those who insist it should be played exclusively on the pipes, by arranging many of the pieces for a line-up comprising his brother Iain on flute, pianist James Ross, US fiddler Bonnie Rideout and cellist Neil Johnstone.

Given the show’s musical focus, it certainly wasn’t a night to counter stereotypes of Gaelic miserablism. Beginning with a caoine-based lament for a MacIntosh chief killed by a fall from his horse on his wedding day, the programme finished with a medley mourning one of the MacCrimmon clan’s many celebrated pipers, touching on various bloody battles, seafaring tragedies and the Glencoe massacre in between.

During the first half, particularly, it did make for somewhat heavy going, but less because of the source content or subject matter as such than the limitations of those ensemble arrangements, which often saw all the musicians involved playing basically the same notes as the pipes, with little or no interaction by way of harmony or counterpoint.

Obviously these last represent controversial issues in piobaireachd circles, but having already flouted the rules in terms of instrumentation, there seemed no reason for MacDonald not to make more creative use of the accompanying talent at his disposal – until he mentioned that they’d only had two days’ rehearsal, which was evidently insufficient to develop the material fully, or to avoid an excess of to-ing and fro-ing onstage as the performers regrouped between numbers.

Given these shortcomings, together with the inherently repetitive nature of piobaireachd’s theme-and-variations structure, distinct longueurs crept in as we approached the interval, despite the excellence of Stewart and Graham’s singing – in some highly challenging songs, written in archaic classical Gaelic – and the vivid vignettes of clan life and culture with which MacDonald introduced each item.

The second half featured greater variety, however, thanks in part to guest appearances by John Purser, accompanying Rideout’s hypnotic viola rendition of a plaintive MacDougal gathering tune with the resonant bass drone of the dord íseal, a long curved Bronze Age horn, and piper Roddy MacLeod, performing the show’s only entire piobaireachd during the hauntingly evocative selection dedicated to Glencoe.

© Sue Wilson, 2009

Links

• Piping Live!