City Halls, Glasgow, 17 January 2010

AFTER Galician piper Carlos Núñez’s exploration of his own Celtic connections with Brazil two nights earlier, Chris Stout’s Brazilian Theory saw the Shetland fiddle ace teaming up with three musicians from São Paulo, plus four from these shores, in the superbly finished version of a show presented as a work-in-progress on a Scottish tour last spring.

Chris Stout

Where Núñez highlighted the centuries-old historical influence of Galician tradition on Brazilian music, Stout’s project carved out a whole new swathe of common ground, building on the interest in Latin music that he first developed working with Salsa Celtica, and then through the British Council-sponsored Orquestra Scotland-Brasil initiative in 2003.

It was the latter that first introduced him to his three Brazilian collaborators – Thomas Rohrer on rabeca, a flat-bodied rustic fiddle, and soprano sax; Carlinhos Antunes on guitars and cuatro, and Rui Barrosi on double bass; harpist Catriona McKay, guitarist Ian Stephenson, double bassist Neil Harland and Martin O’Neill on bodhran completed the line-up.

Stout and the Brazilians, in particular, had been hard at it right from the start of the festival last week, playing its first morning schools gig before guesting with the True North Orchestra not just at Thursday’s opening concert, but their second performance in Perth on Saturday.

In between all that, they’d also clearly been putting in some serious rehearsal time, diligence which shone through in a marvellously polished, assured, tautly cohesive yet vibrantly expansive performance, which took in not only Shetland and Brazilian material but also forays into Balkan, Nordic and Middle Eastern territory, plus a liberal element of adventurous jazzy improvisation.

As samba, bolero and cha-cha met jigs, reels and slow airs, doubly anchored by the radiant conjunction of Stout’s fiddle with Rohrer’s rabeca or sax, and McKay’s dazzling jousts with Antunes’s masterly picking and riffing, this was music where you really couldn’t see the joins, just a sumptuously layered, restlessly shifting panoply of contrasting yet complementary colours, textures and rhythms.

It’s been a few years now since Celtic Connections welcomed the Danish fiddler Harald Haugaard, perhaps the smiliest man in folk music, and an audience favourite at several past festivals in his duo with singer-guitarist Morten Alfred Høirup. He was back this time with his wife, the singer and fellow fiddler Helene Blum, plus a classy backing trio comprising Rasmus Zeeberg on guitar/mandolin, cellist Kirstine Elise Pedersen, and percussionist Sune Rahbek.

In a set that interwove Danish and Celtic, traditional and contemporary material, it was a joy as ever to get reacquainted with Haugaard’s lightly-worn virtuosity, his playing – like his tunes – by turns impishly effervescent and majestically beautiful, matching all-out gusto with chamber-classical grace.

Blum’s limpid, luminous, honeyed yet piquant singing was an equal delight, while the pair of them were jointly responsible for the biggest “Aaww” moment of the festival so far, when he introduced and she sang a diddling-based number he’d written for her, “when I was so in love, I couldn’t speak a word” – a tune that sublimely captured just that unique quality of jubilation.

© Sue Wilson, 2010

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