A dazzling and well coordinated launch

Published on Thursday 17 January 2008 19:02

CELTIC CONNECTIONS *****

CELTIC CONNECTIONS OPENING CONCERT: COMMON GROUND

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

WITH a sell-out crowd in attendance and a massive all-star line-up onstage, the 15th Celtic Connections got off to a near-perfect start, in a concert that delivered fully three hours of richly rewarding, frequently spine-tingling music.

Artistic director Donald Shaw had envisaged the show as being "almost like Celtic Connections in miniature", while the evening's musical director, John McCusker, looked for inspiration to the myriad spontaneous collaborations that happen each year among the hundreds of artists brought together by the festival.

Shaw's description certainly proved valid, with some 25 featured performers including such headline names as the Waterboys' Mike Scott, Irish singer-songwriters Luka Bloom and Damien Dempsey, accordionist Sharon Shannon, Americana prodigy Chris Thile of Nickel Creek fame, and singers Karan Casey, Karine Polwart, Kris Drever, Julie Fowlis and Heidi Talbot. And with most of the ensemble having already performed that morning for 2,000 schoolchildren, launching the tenth anniversary year of Celtic Connections' justly celebrated education programme, they were well warmed up and patently raring to go.

At the same time, this was clearly a programme that had been diligently thought through and rehearsed, avoiding both the bittiness that often bedevils these kinds of occasions, and the excessive to-ing and fro-ing. The mainly song-based setlist furnished a succession of contrasting highlights, from Karan Casey's heartrending a capella rendition of the traditional love lament Jimmy Whelan to Dempsey's magnificently impassioned, rock-fuelled incantation The Masai; Thile's sensitive, soulful reworking of Burns's Sweet Afton to Bloom and Scott duetting on the latter's modern-day aisling ballad Sunny Sailor Boy – with Casey, Fowlis and Talbot on backing vocals.

A formidable line-up of instrumentalists – among them Michael McGoldrick on flutes, whistles and uilleann pipes, fiddlers Aidan O'Rourke, Dezi Donnelly and Lauren MacColl, bodhrn player John Joe Kelly, drummer James Mackintosh, and Eamon Doorley on bouzouki – also gave of their best, cutting loose in some tremendous big-band tune sets as well as artfully framing the songs, while excellent sound quality kept everything bright and distinct, despite the profusion of ingredients in the mix.