Gig review: Andy Irvine & John Doyle/Jeana Leslie & Siobhan Miller

Published on Tuesday 25 January 2011 18:41

ANDY IRVINE & JOHN DOYLE / JEANA LESLIE & SIOBHAN MILLER GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL *****

THE last time I saw Andy Irvine he was playing solo at Stirling Folk Club; now here he was gracing one of Celtic Connections' premier stages, reprising a tryst with guitarist and singer John Doyle originally set up back in 2009, by New York's Irish Arts Centre, as part of a series titled Masters in Collaboration.

Irvine remains the most unassuming of Irish musical legends (although Doyle, a generation younger, isn't far behind), a perpetual old-school troubadour with an agelessly lovely voice, wearing his past with wholly becoming modesty despite formative roles in such seminal outfits as Sweeney's Men, Planxty, Mozaik and Patrick Street. Both men were palpably delighted to be performing together again, settling in as if for an evening's craic with old pals – which is essentially what it felt like with lots of appreciative warmth coming off the audience, too – taking turn about in an aptly free-ranging selection of traditional and contemporary songs, exquisitely adorned with the pair's magical fingerwork on guitar, bouzouki and mandola.

As Siobhan Miller demonstrated with a spine-tingling a cappella rendition of the tragic ballad Queen Jane, her extraordinarily assured, vividly nuanced singing is the most salient strength of her award-winning duo with fiddler, pianist and fellow vocalist Jeana Leslie. In fact, though – and while Leslie's voice is also an instrument of no little potency – their real trump card is the radiant, mercurial harmonic chemistry between them, which illuminated a sparkling set throughout, perhaps most sublimely in an intertwined pair of heart-tugging lullabies.