Reviews: Gaelic epic fails to hit the heights

Published on Monday 21 January 2008 00:02

PRAISE OF BEN DORAIN *** CITY HALLS, GLASGOW

THE hype surrounding Ronald Stevenson's Praise of Ben Dorain has been understandable, given its 45-year incubation and prominence in Saturday's central Celtic Connections concert, which the soon-to-be-80-year-old attended in typically flamboyant style, though visibly ageing.

His adapted setting for double orchestra, double choir and soloists of Gaelic poet Donald Bn MacIntyre's epic poem about the famous West Highland mountain could not have had a greater opportunity to shine than with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and a concoction of choruses under James Grossmith's tight-knit direction.

But the problem with a work that takes half a lifetime to finish is the level of expectation that accompanies its completion.

Those expecting an intense masterpiece to counterbalance Stevenson's greatest work to date – the giant 1962 Passacaglia on DSCH for piano – will, I think, have been disappointed.

There are unquestionable flashes of keen perception – the destabling bitonality of the opening, the Brittenesque energy of the central fugue and some delicious wisps of orchestral colour. But there are tell-tale signs suggesting that the piecing together of the work has been troublesome.

The predominance (perhaps over-dominance) of the Gaelic folk melodies, and the very English mode of their harmonisations, act as barriers to greater, more prolonged flights of inspiration.

Stevenson has previously said so much more in less time. He conquered his musical Everest in the momentous Passacaglia. I suspect Ben Dorain is destined to lie in its mountainous shadow.

KENNETH WALTON

GALICIAN NIGHT ****

GLASGOW OLD FRUITMARKET

"ENERG-IE Galician!" cried Mercedes Pe"n triumphantly, midway through a long night of Galician music. Following a lively warm up from the Anxo Lorenzo Band, Pe"n immediately drew us into her dynamic reworking of tradition.

Thwacking out ricocheting rhythms on her pandeira tambourine, she established a quasi-shamanic on-stage presence, singing songs from her latest work Sih.

Fronting a band that now boasts funky saxophone instead of hurdy-gurdy, she showed how the light and shade of her music has developed.

Fluently moving between Bjrkian playfulness in a love song for her childhood, to shouting-to-the-wind as if summoning the cows home from quite a distance, she brought home just why her innovations place her at the cutting edge of European world music.

The ancestral essentials of her compositions are now infiltrated with cosmopolitan traces drawn from Mali, the Caribbean, Cape Verde, the Balkans, and, notably, Zimbabwe for the dancing.

Her long-time collaborator piper, Xos Manuel Budio, guested (and she later for him).

His set with his own band offered a more rock-cum-club chill-out atmosphere, complete with V-Jay, suitable for the round midnight hour. The boyish Budio is a lyrical romantic at heart, his music evoking the more spiritual side of his country.

While eminently danceable, the whole evening would have rounded off better if we could have sat or laid down for many of his dreamy-techno underpinned pieces.

If the night did not transport, it was, nevertheless, impressive.