Music review: Piping Live!, various venues, Glasgow

OUTSIDE the National Piping Centre’s thronged Street Café, someone is sporting a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Bagpipes – putting the ‘Fun’ back in Funeral”. It’s a witty manifestation of what is often a very serious business, as Glasgow becomes a drone-centred universe during Piping Live!, the city’s week-long count-down to today’s World Pipe Band Championships on Glasgow Green.

The Sri Dasmesh Pipe Band, a Malaysian Sikh Band, tunes up outside the Gurdwara Singh Sabah temple in Glasgow ahead of their performances at Pipping Live! and the World Pipe Band Championships PIC: John Devlin

Piping Live!, various venues, Glasgow ****

The festival line-up includes indigenous bagpipes from Sweden, Spain, and Slovakia. Thursday lunchtime at the Piping Centre, however, was firmly rooted in the Scottish competition circuit, with a father and son recital by Angus D MacColl, a four-times winner of the prestigious Glenfiddich solo piping championship, and his silver medallist son Angus J.

“I’ve not a tune left to play!” protested MacColl senior, as his son finished his spot with a fleet-fingered reel sequence; but there are always more tunes, as Angus D demonstrated, including a crisp yet unhurried procession of two-four marches, led off by the ever-popular Highland Wedding, and the strathspey Devil in the Kitchen morphing slickly into reel time.

A brief subway ride into Glasgow’s leafy West End found the piping Centre’s Otago Street outlier hosting an eloquent documentary film, L’or des MacCrimmon – “MacCrimmon’s Gold,” by Gérard Alle, about the celebrated Breton piper Patrick Molard’s obsession with piobaireachd, particularly the music of the MacCrimmons, which he was taught – largely through the vocal transmission known as canntaireachd – by the renowned Robert Brown and Robert Nicol, the “Bobs of Balmoral”. It vividly tracks Molard’s pilgrimage to the MacCrimmon heartland of Skye and his deciphering of the ancient Campbell Canntaireachd manuscript.

Molard, who presented the screening, describes piobaireachd as “music that transcends time” and followed up by playing two extracts from the manuscript, one of them titled Failt Na Misk – “Salute to drunkenness”, although this was intoxication of a different sort, sounding out majestic strains which hadn’t been heard for two centuries.

Back at the Strathclyde Suite, the exuberantly cheered final of the festival’s Pipe Idol competition saw 16-year-old Brodie Watson-Massey of Edinburgh take the title with a set that concluded with a briskly chattering trio of reels.

Watson-Massey, who plays in the National Youth Pipe Band of Scotland and in George Heriot’s juvenile band, won a set of pipes by the competition sponsor, Fred Morrison. Hotly contested, with all four finalists still in their teens, it was a striking affirmation of the future health of Scottish piping. JIM GILCHRIST