Music reviews: Blas Festival | Celebrating the Regal Pipe Eden Court Theatre

Comprising 38 concerts over nine days, spanning the Highlands from Wick to the Isle of Eigg and Lochinver to the top of Cairngorm, this year’s seventh Blas festival kicked off at the weekend with a raft of sellout shows. These included what may well have been Beauly’s first ever movie world première, with the unveiling of 2011’s main festival commission, Heisgeir, a feature-length film dovetailed with live music from its creator, Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis, and her three-piece band.

Heisgeir is the Gaelic name for the now-uninhabited Monach Isles, a few miles west of Fowlis’s native North Uist. Originally inspired by family history – her great-grandmother was from Heisgeir – she traced and interviewed half a dozen or so people who had lived on or fished around the islands (a frequent destination for North Uist boats), including the last person to be born there, and one of the last to leave when they were finally evacuated in 1949.

Their recollections, filmed in situ amid the Hebridean landscape, were interwoven with Fowlis’s own lucidly informative voiceover – all the speech being in Gaelic, with English subtitles – and John MacKinnon’s beautiful, often painterly camerawork.

The film was further complemented by new and traditional songs and tunes, during which the musicians – Éamon Doorley on bouzouki, fiddler Duncan Chisholm and guitarist Ross Martin, with Fowlis on whistle as well as vocals – were spectrally half-illuminated behind the translucent projection screen.

Despite this so-called summer’s weather having confined location filming to just two days – one of them blanketed in rain and fog, though the other was spectacularly sunny – MacKinnon’s craft and Lindy Cameron’s expert editing created a wholly absorbing, visually captivating blend of documentary and art movie.

Implicit reflections on bygone ways of life, the nature and role of traditional culture, and notions of “progress” emerged or resonated organically and movingly through the finished product, which left this member of the spellbound, loudly appreciative audience with a potent urge to visit Heisgeir, tempered by the feeling that I already had.

If bagpipe music represents a distinct sub-sector with the Scottish folk or traditional scene, it’s one which itself encompasses a wide spectrum of styles, formats, modes of performance and criteria for excellence. A night devoted to piping has long been an annual fixture at Blas, and the programme at Celebrating the Regal Pipe comprised a particularly adroit and effective cross-section.

Opening the proceedings was the mighty Angus MacColl of Oban, demonstrating the artistry that recently won him a fourth coveted clasp at the Northern Meeting, before he later reappeared at the helm of a buoyantly assured performance by the Oban High School Pipe Band, last year’s juvenile Champion of Champions.

There was a contrasting solo turn from Mairearad Green, switching from her more usual accordion for a selection of her own arresting tunes, and a display of typically relaxed yet formidable virtuosity by Glenuig brothers Allan and Angus MacDonald.

But perhaps the strongest bridge between traditional and contemporary piping was forged by Seudan, a trio performing Gaelic-based, pre-military material on replica 18th century pipes. Pitched markedly lower than modern instruments, these exhibited a wonderfully round, rich, limpid timbre, thrillingly matched by the players’ balance of legato suppleness and close-knit precision.

SUE WILSON