Celtic Connections review: Ross Ainslie's Sanctuary Band, Mitchell Theatre, Glasgow

He may have snatched a couple of pauses for re-tuning '“ breaking, he conceded, his insistence that the music he and his Sanctuary Band were premiering be performed '“ and listened to '“ in one continuous flow, but Ross Ainslie had much to be pleased with in his skilfully realised composition, Sanctuary.

Ross Ainslie’s Sanctuary Band, Mitchell Theatre, Glasgow ****

With Ainslie on whistles and – kept for a dramatic finale – small and Highland pipes, and leading a beefy septet including guitarist Steven Byrnes, violinist Greg Lawson and Ali Hutton on additional whistles, Sanctuary opened with whistles and Lawson’s eastern-inflected violin intertwining beguilingly.

As artist Somhairle MacDonald’s cosmic psychedelia swirled in the background, the sequence progressed through increasingly muscular and drum-driven sections, from chirpy hornpipe and homely Scots air, through a dramatic, klezmer-ish outburst from Lawson, to the climactic Let the Wild Ones Roam, with Highland pipes crackling fiercely, before subsiding under poet Jock Urquhart’s on-screen declamatory closure.

The bar had already been set high by an opening performance on small pipes by Brighde Chaimbeul, a 2016 BBC Young Folk Award-winner, intuitively accompanied by guitarist Innes White. When she joined Ainslie and guitarist Byrnes for a closing set, the twin small pipes united in an energetic Bulgarian stomp over thrumming bouzouki, as well as a plangently harmonised slow air that boded well indeed for the album the two pipers are planning.