Piping Live! reviews: Morvan Massif Trio | Bann & Spirit of Ceòlas

Bann & Spirit of Ceòlas, National Piping Centre, Glasgow ★★★★

Midday sees the first band of the day – in this case the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo Pipes and Drums – troop from the National Piping Centre, down Sauchiehall Street and, in what has become a Piping Live! ritual, strike up under the disinterested gaze of Donald Dewar’s statue at the top of Buchanan Street. The warm air seems to thicken with this fiery music.

Piping Live! – the city’s week-long countdown to this weekend’s World Pipe Band Championships at Glasgow Green – is centred on the National Piping Centre but occupies other venues and amid the Spanish baroque splendour of Kelvingrove Museum, a ritual of a different kind , the museum’s famed lunchtime organ recital, gives way to the less familiar but thrilling sound of a central French musette shrilling out bourées and other dance tunes alongside accordion and guitar as the Morvan Massif Trio provide an afternoon recital.

Composed of piper Gaël Rutkowski, accordionist Seb Lagrange and familiar Highland guitarist Ross Martin, the trio draws largely on traditional music of France’s Morvan region. At Kelvingrove their sound competed with difficulty against the building’s echoing background hubbub, but it was an engaging set nevertheless, dance music swirling from Rutkowski’s musette, before he changed to Irish uilleann pipes for a waltz, deftly switching midway back to the French instrument. They finished with a Scots air followed by two lively compositions by Lagrange, and I could have listened to much more, ideally under more sympathetic acoustic conditions.

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Back at the National Piping Centre, Bann, a pan-Celtic showcase of women musicians was curated by Scottish smallpipes virtuoso Brighde Chaimbeul, joined by Irish uilleann piper Louise Mulcahy, Scots Gaelic singer Kirsty-Ann McInnes, Manx fiddler Isla Callister and harpist-pianist Ingrid Henderson, joined at times by another smallpipes player, April Sutherland. It was voice over drones, however, that opened proceedings with McInnes’s magisterial lament, Cumha Mhic Shiridh, Irish and Scottish chanters keening between verses.

A more up-tempo song, Ill a Bho Dhubh – “The Boy of the Black Cow” – gave way to the stirring O’Neill’s March on pipes and fiddle, while another highlight was the lament Pililiù, singer and pipes alike echoing the burbling call of the redshank, a bird associated with that liminal territory between life and death.

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The concert had opened with a similarly female line-up, Spirit of Ceòlas, celebrating the vital cultural contribution made by the organisation that started life as a summer school on South Uist. The line-up also included harpist Henderson and her sister Megan on fiddle and vocals, along with piper and flautist Sheena Peteranna and step-dancer Sandra Robertson.

They snapped into top gear right away, smallpipes and fiddle spinning strathpeys over piano and Robertson rattling the boards in a step dance. As well as songs of considerable pedigree, including one by the renowned 18th-century bard Duncan Ban MacIntyre (still timely, about the importance of preserving tradition), their repertoire included recently composed and fresh-sounding tunes – reflecting strength of ongoing Gaelic culture, thanks to the likes of Ceòlas,

The Piping Live! festival runs until 17 August, see www.pipinglive.co.uk

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