The Murdo Macfarlane Songbook

The Murdo Macfarlane Songbook ***

THE PIPING CENTRE, GLASGOW

REPRISING a pair of concerts staged last year at Stornoway’s An Lanntair arts centre, to commemorate and honour the late Lewis bard Murdo MacFarlane (1901-1982), this performance by the leading Gaelic singers Ishbel MacAskill, Anna Murray and Fiona Mackenzie - Lewis natives all - combined compositions penned by its subject with other songs, traditional and modern, indigenous to his beloved home island.

Gaelic song is justly renowned for its ability to transcend temporal and linguistic barriers. Two songs from MacAskill - one MacFarlane’s, evoking the brutally shattered ideals of the First World War and listing the names of his older school fellows who didn’t come back; the other written by a relative of MacAskill’s before his death before the Second World War - hauntingly underlined the point that even far-flung Hebridean communities have always shared in the world’s struggles. All the more so, given the island’s economic dependance on the sea, whose rhythms seemed to pulse beneath almost every song. As indicated by a near sell-out crowd, you couldn’t have asked for a better line-up, their styles sufficiently different to diversify the show’s palette, but united in the balance they struck between sturdiness and delicacy, and in their empathy with their material.