Music review: International Piping Concert, Glasgow

THE obvious international element in this Piping Live! concert was the opening half by Galician gaita star Anxo Lorenzo, from Spain's Celtic north-west corner. No stranger to Glasgow, after several visits to Celtic Connections, he displayed a partiality for Scottish as well as native tunes, plus a smattering from Ireland, accompanied by Xos Liz on bouzouki and Irish fiddler Eoghan Neff.

Lorenzo is always a passionate and exciting performer, matching formidable technical prowess with bold freewheeling flair and rock'n'roll attack, but on this occasion he seemed to let his own excitement rather get the better of him, playing mostly so fast that the music's superficial thrills barely glossed over the blurry, breathless, often unlovely scramble beneath.

While Fred Morrison's home may be just down the road in Bishopton, he's among Scotland's international piping icons, inspiring across borders with the traits richly demonstrated here: not only his deep-dyed fluency on whistle and uilleann pipes as well as the bellows-blown Highland model, but also his improvisational artistry. The latter feeds back into his compositional appetite for adventure, as highlighted by the exhilarating bluegrass-influenced material from his latest release Outlands, which featured prominently in his set. Closely and expertly flanked by Matheu Watson on guitar and Martin O'Neill on bodhran, Morrison too reached hair-raising speeds without sacrificing musicality.