Celtic Connections review: Scots Women: Generations o’ Change, City Halls, Glasgow

Boasting an impressive, multi-generational cast of performers, this was an outstanding celebration of traditional song, writes David Pollock

Scots Women: Generations O’ Change, City Halls, Glasgow ****

The Scots Women Live from Celtic Connections 2001 album recorded a landmark concert, in which many of Scotland’s finest established and upcoming female folk singers were celebrated through a collection of songs in the Scots language. Among those featured were Cilla Fisher, Sheila Stewart, Corrina Hewat, Elspeth Cowie, Sheena Wellington and Karine Polwart.

Whether there were plans for a 20th anniversary concert during what turned out to be the lockdown period is unknown, but this 23rd anniversary reunion – organised by the Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland – was more than welcome, with many original talents and a new generation of singers involved.

Attended by an audience as multi-generational as those onstage, the feeling in the room was one of warmth and celebration. Led and musically directed by young Aberdeenshire folk singer and Scots language advocate Iona Fyfe, the ensemble comprised 14 singers, whose varied tones created the most powerful effect when all came together to bookend each of the show’s two halves with powerful choral harmonies.

Alongside a trio of musicians playing guitar, mandolin and fiddle, they opened with the title song of the concert and were later led by Wellington in a musical version of the poet William Soutar’s Ballad and Aileen Carr on Aberdeenshire traditional The Bonnie Wee Lassie’s Answer (aka Farewell Tae Glasgow City).

The ensemble also played Follow the Heron in tribute to the absent Polwart, and the finale featured Strong Women Rule the World by the concert’s original musical director Brian McNeill, The Parting Glass in tribute to the late Sheila Stewart, and the closing Freedom Come-All-Ye.

On the way, Hewat’s interpretation of Sydney Goodsir Smith’s poetry for voice and harp particularly grabbed the attention, while Natalie Chalmers, Amy Lord, Ellie Beaton and mother and siblings trio Tripple were among the many young singers more than holding their own.

It was a packed evening of outstanding traditional song, with the sense not so much that a baton was being handed over, but that all were grasping it tightly together at once.