Celtic Connections Opening Concert, Glasgow review: 'as unpredictably eclectic as the festival itself'

Celtic Connections’ first night, celebrating the Dear Green Place’s 850th anniversary, opened not with that bell which, in Glasgow lore, never rang, but with the juddering bellow of the carnyx, a Bronze Age war horn, courtesy of Abraham Cupeiro.

Its roar gave way to the spirited jigs and reels of the Glasgow Trad Collective before singer and MC Siobhan Miller, supported by both the Collective and a stalwart house band, led us through a programme which proved as unpredictably eclectic as the festival itself.

There was, for instance, the rollicking Eighties indie-pop of the Bluebells, re-assembled for the occasion, but also the haunting stillness of the Craig Armstrong String Ensemble playing a movement from the composer’s violin concerto, its elegiac tone reflected by archive footage of long vanished shipyards.

Improbable seeming juxtapositions included the Glasgow Piping Quintet sounding a stately Salute to the Bell before accompanying the Qawalli Project, whose ecstatic Sufi singing demonstrated that drones aren’t the sole prerogative of bagpipes.

There was a beaty evocation of Winter from Love and Money’s James Grant and Douglas MacIntyre and unadorned sentiment from Roddy Hart’s rendering of Billy Connolly’s I Wish I Was in Glasgow.

Ireland’s Karan Casey delivered the poignant anti-war song The King’s Shilling – “for all the mothers”, Ainsley Hammil’s The Will of the People evoked women’s militancy in the famous Glasgow Rent Strikes, while women’s voices were raised in stirring multi-cultural fervour by Maryhill’s Joyous Choir.

The all-women Kinnaris Quintet, meanwhile, were joined by students of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to put a perpetual-motion spin on their fiddle-driven set.

It was Paul McKenna, though, who said it all, leading the late Michael Marra’s wryly affectionate Mother Glasgow, name-checking that fabled bird, tree, bell and fish with the exhortation: “Let Glasgow flourish!”

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