Celtic Connections
Ireland 2016: The Chieftains & Special Guests
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
If all the people who wanted to appear had turned up there would have been quite an overspill on the Royal Concert Hall stage on Friday. Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Ry Cooder and others all sent their apologies via the irrepressible Paddy Moloney, allegedly. As it was, it was still a spectacle and at times a veritable riotous assembly.
It was, ostensibly, a celebration of the centenary of Dublin’s Easter Uprising but to nobody’s surprise it turned out to be that and much more. Moloney has been leading the Chieftains for fifty-three years and is well used to putting guest lists together. Even so, the group’s familiar finale, in which Miss MacLeod’s Reel can be redirected almost anywhere on the compass could have been a concert in itself.
With an orchestra swelling the Chieftains’ sound with admirably authentic smeddum, the usual whistle, flute, fiddle, and bodhran interludes had added companions such as a mini pipe band feature, a Gaelic choir sing-out, Spanish guitar virtuosity, the wonderful Karan Casey slipping seamlessly into a gorgeously heartfelt reading of Andy Irvine’s James Connolly, Lewis’s own Alyth McCormack playing a sweet Hebridean Rita Coolidge to the splendidly weathered Kris Kristofferson, and more.
The concert itself was a travelogue, begun in Dublin through a well-received set by former Dubliners fiddler John Sheehan and singer-guitarist Declan O’Rourke, and ranged across Mexico, famine-era Ireland, Nashville, Galicia and Brittany with a natural energy that picked up even further with the spring-heeled, blurry limbed dance steps of the band’s Canadian fiddler, John Polanski and his brother, Nathaniel and a similarly accomplished and mobile Irish dance troupe.
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