Corran Halls, Oban, 1 September 2012

THE Corran Halls stand a mere pebble’s throw from the storm-tossed waters of the harbour, making them a perfectly appropriate venue for fiddler Aidan O’Rourke’s latest work.

CONTAINING one of the 20×12-minute compositions commissioned for and premiered during the 2012 London Olympics, TAT-1 is inspired by the submarine transatlantic telephone cable system laid 56 years ago between Gallanach Bay, which lies just south of Oban, and Newfoundland. O’Rourke’s reasoning is that the cable, like the Olympics, was a way of linking people closer together.

Aidan O'Rourke (photo Craig McKay)

Musically the piece is in many ways a continuation of the musical development shown in O’Rourke’s 2008 album, An Tobar, commissioned by the eponymous Tobermory arts centre which is a noted wellspring of the Scottish music scene. The same quintet of world-class musical collaborators is involved; O’Rourke himself, harpist Catriona McKay, saxophonist Phil Bancroft, percussionist and bodhran guru Martin O’Neill and pianist Paul Harrison – and the same fearlessly innovative and inquisitive spirit is manifest.

O’Rourke composes like an Impressionist painter, using a wide palette of musical tones and textures, including audio archive of telephone conversations and radio broadcasts, to create evocative soundscapes. You could call it jazz, but that would put off a lot of people. It’s informed by traditional music but is entirely untraditional. It may well end up as classical music, but that’s still in the future. Call it fusion, for now.

‘Gallanach’, the first segment, opens with O’Neill’s metronomically precise, insistent, galloping bodhran beat, a beat which recurs throughout TAT-1 and could be inspired by the pulsing of sound through the cables, or the motors of the ship, HMTS Monarch, which laid 1500 miles of continuous cable across the Atlantic – and gives its name to the fourth segment. It’s followed by ‘Clarenville’, named for the settlement in Newfoundland where the other end of the cable emerged. Contemporaneous radio interviews add more texture and humour, as well as setting the work in its historical context.

The heart of the piece is ‘TAT-1′ itself, with some of the most heartrendingly beautiful solos of the evening from Bancroft and Harrison, before the insistent beat returns, carried here by the harp and pizzicato fiddle. The final segment, ‘Hotline’, opens with a recording of President Krushchev talking to President Kennedy via an interpreter – because TAT-1 also carried the hotline between Moscow and Washington during the Cold War.

It’s a densely packed finale weaving all the musical threads together in a most satisfying way. With a mere five instruments and a dash of laptop trickery, O’Rourke conjures for his audience the feeling of journeying across the wild emptiness of the Atlantic Ocean. At an hour or so, the Olympiad commissioners certainly got value for money.

There is, by common consent, no encore. Nothing, as my neighbours remarked, could follow that.

It was, however, preceded by a brief performance from 17-year old Tobermory resident Fiona McAdam, blessed with a strong voice and song-writing talent. In ‘Storm’ her voice displayed impressive light and shade and should have Rachel Sermanni looking to her laurels. One to watch. A CD release of TAT-1 is planned, probably launching at Celtic Connections 2013.

© Jennie Macfie, 2012

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