Festival round-up: Piping Live!, Glasgow

Inveraray and District are named as World Pipe Band Champions

Monday morning found me in the festival’s hub, the National Piping Centre, listening in on the piobaireachd section of the Masters Solo Piping Championship, from which the winner goes on to compete in October’s crème-de-la crème Glenfiddich solo championship at Blair Atholl. One competitor, Brian Johnston, was playing The Unjust Incarceration, a centuries-old piobaireachd commemorating the imprisonment of a clan chief on the Bass Rock during the 1420s, and as he fingered the stately signalling of the piobaireachd’s variations, the couple seated in front of me were intently following its notation on their iPad.

In the event, the overall Masters title was won by the Canadian piper Jack Lee, renowned both as a soloist and as pipe major of the great Simon Fraser University Pipe Band.

Outside, the 21st century occasionally intruded a little too fiercely, at the Piping Centre’s Street Café, where the Italian ensemble Nova Musa found themselves competing with a couple of fire engines. Apart from the distractions of blaring sirens, Nova Musa proved an intriguing combination of zampogna – a large Italian bagpipe, accordion and tambourine with bassoon, French horn and double bass. Surprisingly, theirs was a highly coherent and melodic sound, the reedy shrilling of bagpipe and accordion contrasting with the classical instruments, rather in the manner of peasantry from a Breughel painting posturing irreverently against the more restrained chorusing of horn and bassoon.

Just a short Underground ride away, at the College of Piping in Glasgow’s West End, there was an impressive insight into the formidable talent emerging within the ranks of the National Youth Pipe Band of Scotland. To name individuals in these circumstances would be invidious, but the band members, some still in their mid-teens, who gave solo, duet and quartet performances before a brief set from the full band, suggested that older generations may have to look to their laurels.

Returning to the city centre and George Square, which becomes a piping amphitheatre for the duration of the festival, a welcoming west of Scotland smirr lifted for the Pipers Trail, a pipe band spin-off from the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, its members drawn from ten different countries. Further internationalism, though in a gentler mode, came from Mladá Dudáká Muzika, a brightly dressed troupe from the Czech Republic, whose goat-headed, bellows-blown dudy pipes blended with the sextet’s clarinets to produce a mellow, pastoral sound.

Later that night, at St Luke’s, there was there was much unbridled exuberance, rather than solemn commemoration, at the launch of Mac Ìle, an album of music by the late Fraser Shaw, a piper and composer who succumbed to MS in 2015. Here the pipe and whistle honours were fulfilled with characteristic flair by Ross Ainslie while a quality line-up of Shaw’s fellow-musicians, including Gráinne Brady, Adam Sutherland, Laura-Beth Salter and Jenn Butterworth, generated some vigorous sets on fiddles, guitars and keyboard, not least the hypnotic flicker of their Murmuration set.

Some inevitably heartfelt moments included a favourite Gaelic song of Shaw’s, sung by his former colleague in the group Cluanas, Kathleen Graham, and Innes Watson’s plangent setting of a slow air by Shaw, out of which emerged a recording of the composer himself, playing it on whistle – haunting wasn’t the word.

Whistles, however, would have been given short shrift at Glasgow Green on Saturday, where pipes and drums by the thousands converged for the finals of the 71st World Pipe Band Championships, a two-day event which attracted 8,000 pipers and drummers from 15 nations, as well as an estimated 35,000 spectators.

During “The Worlds”, as the event is known, the Green becomes a unique and unforgettable sound world, as the snarl of snares and ceaseless drones from countless bands become all-pervading. And at the heart of it all, in the Grade 1 arena, there was a spectacular turn-up for the books as Inveraray & District Pipe Band wrested the world title from Northern Ireland’s Field Marshal Montgomery, who have won the championship 11 times over the past decade and a half. The FMMs finished second, with Dublin’s St Laurence O’Toole pipe band taking third place.

The Argyll band has described a meteroric trajectory through the grades since they were formed just 14 years ago by Pipe Major Stuart Liddell, himself a highly successful competition soloist. Their musicality triumphed in their march, strathspey and reel trio of Links of Forth, The Bob of Fettercairn and Charlie’s Welcome, while their medley featured some tasteful harmonising, right from the opening hornpipe William Grey and in the fine air Hector the Hero, through to closing jigs and a smartly arranged finish.