Summers/Silvola & Bozzini Quartet, Celtic Connections Glasgow review: 'explosive'

From cross-cultural mash-ups to spectral figures, this creative collaboration between the Scots-Norwegian duo of fiddle player Sarah-Jane Summers and guitarist Juhani Silvola with Canadian new music specialists the Bozzini Quartet could be explosive, haunting, occasionally bewildering, but never dull.

Their opening piece, all wheedling harmonics and bowed sighs sounding over muted pizzicato, set the tone of this very particular string-driven sound world. The quartet players led the opening of Silvona’s composition Into the Dark Night, melody unfolding over stealthy pacing, while in Brocken Spectre, evoking the legendary Grey Man of Ben MacDui, Summers brought in an eerie theme against the quartet strings, creating a fine sense of the uncanny before fading out with a wordless, vocalised chorus.

In contrast, quartet violinist Alissa Cheung’s gleeful splicing of the familiar North American Chicken Reel with a Nordic tune created farmyard chaos of the first order, while another piece, Summers explained, inserted the notes of a traditional Highland pipe march into the structure of a Norwegian Hardanger fiddle tune – “a proper mash-up”, which at times pulsed in waves of minimalist string sound but ended quietly and eerily, with subtle electronic interjections. What Summers’s Highland fiddle mentor, the late great Donald Riddell, might have made of it, who knows, but it made for intriguing listening.

In an short but impressive opening set, the young Glasgow trio Fell Line – accordionist Megan MacDonald, fiddler Chloe Bryce and guitarist Calum McIlroy – also included new material of their own, but more tightly thirled to the tradition. There was a fleetness to their jig and reel sets, while their song accompaniments didn’t clutter, as when Bryce laid aside her fiddle to give sensitive voice to the ballad Earl Richard.

READ MORE: KT Tunstall, Celtic Connections Glasgow review: 'effervescent'