Piping Live!, Glasgow review: 'a showcase of sonic exploration'

Piping Live!, various venues, Glasgow ★★★★

For a week every summer, the Dear Green Place is possessed by the age old alchemy of reed, wind and dexterous fingering, culminating in the World Pipe Band Championship on Glasgow Green. On the opening Monday of the Piping Live! festival’s 23rd iteration, its heart was clustered, partly under canvas, around the National Piping Centre, its packed and diverse programme ranging from a discussion on piobraireachd and literature to the launch of a major tune collection from the Royal Regiment of Scotland.

But primarily, there was the music: on the Centre Stage platform, a constant succession of performances opened with the first heat of the festival’s Pipe Idol competition, with four young pipers, three male, one female, from Scotland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand delivering impressive tune sets. As these serious young contenders trod the boards the audience featured a heartening proportion of young enthusiasts – many will no doubt be from visiting pipe bands, here for the Glasgow Green tournament. There was also a smattering of buggies and infants, some looking puzzled, some vocally unenthusiastic, others birling about, making shapes – possible future contenders perhaps.

A lynchpin of the festival is the daily lunchtime recital in the Piping Centre, on this occasion given by the legendary Canadian piper and prolific composer Bruce Gandy, renowned for his multi-award-winning prowess on the solo competition circuit and also as a member of the World Championship winning 78th Fraser Highlanders pipe band. Here, however, he was playing in more relaxed circumstances, stepping on stage to an audience chorus of “happy birthday” and opening with a stately march in 3/4 time that snapped into a trio of jigs. Many more of his own compositions followed – a wistful air, a traditional sounding march, strathspey and reel set and, perhaps most memorable, a piobaireachd composed for his grandson, the unhurried signalling quality of its ground unfolding into increasingly chattering variations.

Back outside, the drub of pipe bands drifted faintly in from Sauchiehall Street as a memorable reminder that bagpipe is by no means confined to Scotland took the stage in the shape of the Portuguese duo Alma Menor – accordionist Tiago Marques and piper Tiago Morais. The Portuguese share the same bagpipe, the gaita, that is found in Spain’s Galicia and Asturias territories, and in Morais’s hands it swirled thrillingly around Marques’s complementary and muscular button accordion, as in one tune they called Fantango –”fantastical tango” – which indeed suggested a more abandoned pace than the familiar tango strut, pipes shrilling demonically. San Miguel’s Waltz, meanwhile, executed some dramatic tempo changes.

More or less leaving tradition well behind, a descent into the dim club precincts of Nice N Sleazy found the festival’s Ceol Nua – “new music” – strand featuring players pushing the boundaries of what the bagpipe can do. Flynn Butler Fraser combined smallpipes with electronica that seemed to loop and layer his drones into an overwhelmingly immersive sound world, an immense hive of booming drones. Another creation looped a woman’s singing of the traditional north-east ballad Mill o’ Tifty’s Annie into a pipe and vocal riff that became positively spooky.

Venturesome Breton piper Erwan Keravec, who would feature later in the festival-leading piping arrangements of music by Terry Riley and Philip Glass, eschewed electronics, but sustained an astonishing solid half hour, without a break, employing seemingly extended fingering techniques to make his Highland pipe chirrup, chatter and whoop dementedly and hypnotically. And as this reviewer headed late-trainwards, another bagpipe experimenter, Harry Gorski-Brown, on smallpipes, was unleashing suitably ominous electronic rumbles to accompany his singing of sanguinary Gaelic songs. Not your night if you were simply looking for a good tune, perhaps, but an extraordinary showcase of sonic exploration.

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