Supergroup orchestra straddles folk and classical music to forge new connection

Published on Wednesday 17 January 2007 00:06

AS THE bill-topping names vie with each other in this year's Celtic Connections programme, an afternoon concert this weekend should provide a revealing showcase for an emerging generation of Scottish folk - and classical - musicians. On Saturday afternoon, young music students will get to grips with a challenging new composition by Dick Gaughan, and launch what could become a standing "Celtic Connections Orchestra".

"It is a bit of an experiment," says the festival's new musical director, Donald Shaw, Capercaillie accordionist and pianist. Nevertheless, he is enthusiastic about what could become a semi-permanent ensemble for the festival, combining students from Strathclyde University and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, the City of Edinburgh Music School and the West of Scotland Schools Orchestra, as well as from those two prolific breeding grounds of traditional musicians, Fis Ros in the west Highlands, currently celebrating its 21st anniversary, and the Glasgow branch of Ireland's Comhaltas Ceoltir ireann. These diverse forces will unite on Saturday under the baton of Mark Sheridan, the Strathclyde University-based composer and arranger long associated with the festival.

"It's probably the first time we've created an orchestra with different styles of musicians within it," says Shaw. "In the great Russian orchestras that Shostakovich and Stravinsky used to conduct, they used to insist that the violinists play with different bowing styles so they'd get a bit of vitality into it, and I'm hoping that will come out in our orchestra. It will be immaculate in its technical playing, with a certain element of coarseness."

Shaw relishes the idea of combining traditional and classical musicians, and certainly if last November's Second National Showcase of Excellence in Glasgow's City Halls was anything to go by, concertgoers are in for a treat. That event combined young classical and folk players from Scotland's four state music schools, some of whom will be involved on Saturday.

Shaw had his own experience of working with young musicians three years ago when, for Celtic Connections opening commission, he composed Harvest, a pan-Celtic extravaganza which combined some 70 young Scottish players with more seasoned artists. He found himself bowled over by the youngsters' abilities: "When I was first commissioned, I spent the first few weeks writing some stuff and being quite pleased with it. Then I went up to Fort William for the first rehearsal and there were 30 of the fis kids there and I just came away thinking, 'God, I've really under-challenged them.' I pretty much threw it away and started again at a much more challenging level."

The centrepiece of Saturday's event will be Dick Gaughan's Treaty 300, commissioned from that veteran singer and guitarist to mark the current tricentenary of the Act of Union. Gaughan's first venture into composing for orchestra, Timewaves for guitar and orchestra, attracted favourable responses at Connections three years ago, and while Shaw hasn't yet heard any of this latest composition, he reckons "it will be quite challenging, in true Dick form... not something you will fall asleep to."

Dozing off is similarly unlikely during the concert's other set-piece, the tried, tested and enthusiastically received McKay's Memoirs, a vivid and characterful piece for strings, percussion, pipes and clarsach, written some years ago - again for young performers - by the late Martyn Bennett.

Shaw nurses some gleeful if insubstantial ambitions that if the CC orchestra does get off the ground, it could, among other things, turn the tables on all those folk-song-arranging classical composers, perhaps reprising Bartk's dances, as did the Hungarian band Musikas very effectively a few years ago. "It would be a great marriage of styles, and the Bartk dances are essentially folk tunes anyway. It would be great to kind of pillage the great composers who used folk music. I'm a fan of a lot of classical work and it would be exciting to reinvent it in terms of instrumentation. That's what folk music does." As Richard Thompson used to sing: "Roll over Vaughan Williams."

• The Celtic Connections Youth Concert is on Saturday in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 1pm.