Celtic Connections: Béla Fleck with the BBC SSO

City Halls, Glasgow

Rob Adams

FOUR STARS

His demeanour suggested someone who feared he might be about to live up to the title of his first concerto, The Impostor, but Béla Fleck sounded entirely at home with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Fleck has taken his banjo into all sorts of musical environments and just as he immerses himself in jazz duets with pianist Chick Corea and has previously mined the very heart of African traditions, so he has composed an orchestral work that explores the possibilities in depth rather than drawing in nicely shaded accompaniments.

Call and response passages with woodwinds and brass emphasised the first movement’s folksy flavour, with the banjo tracing a supplementary song pattern, and tubular bells enhanced the second’s dramatic quality, eerie dissonances and cheeky banjo harmonics adding to the contrasts. It was in the third, though, where Fleck really began to fly as both composer and instrumentalist. Its bluegrass strings sounded like a natural extension of the banjo, and New Orleans riffs and mewling, bluesy clarinet confirmed that the “impostor” had succeeded in capturing whole swathes of Americana, while the candenza was vintage Fleck, flowing, high speed arpeggios, brilliantly imaginative inversions and strings positively singing with musicality.

Singing musicality also featured in the concert’s coda, where Liam O’Flynn, whose uilleann pipes had sometimes been overpowered by the orchestra in full cry during the first half, joined Fleck, guitarist Arty McGlynn and keyboardist Rod McVey in a superbly measured jig, The Gold Ring. This was a virtuosic meeting with O’Flynn and Fleck playing with fabulous expression and such wonderful fluency and understanding that it begs a rematch at greater length.