Celtic Connections

Laura Marling with the BBC SSO

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Rob Adams

Three stars

CELTIC Connections has long been about exploring possibilities and creating opportunities and these features have become more and more apparent through director Donald Shaw’s tenure. Musicians are encouraged to think beyond their previous ambitions. Cultures from different continents are invited to share the same stage and both emerging and established talents can be given a significant shop window.

So it was on this opening night concert, which had an outstanding, if not always fully occupied, house band in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. They were on hand for the main event in the second half, but they also accompanied Karine Polwart as she marked the occasion of Donald Trump’s inauguration with poetic scepticism couched in a beautiful orchestration, and then they matched the incorrigible Dubliner Declan O’Rourke’s descent, or perhaps ascent, into madness on Slieve Bloom.

In a first half that also saw young troubadours Rachel Sermanni and Adam Holmes trail their individual gigs later in the festival in a compatible duet, and showcased the splendid respective grooves of Sahrawi singer Aziza Brahim and Michigan’s modern bluegrassers Lindsay Lou & the Flatbellys, the orchestra’s beautifully tempered setting for Cara Dillon’s lovely singing of She Moved Through the Fair was memorable indeed.

Celtic Connections has been trying to lure Laura Marling for some time and pitching her with the BBC SSO ensured the English singer-songwriter’s debut was anything but routine, although it did end rather anticlimactically. Marling uses words well, stringing lyrics – and in the opening sequence from her Once I Was An Eagle album, songs – into effective, sometimes gospel-like rhythmical incantations.

Her inclusion of Leonard Cohen’s Avalanche underlined the influence of the late lamented poetic master on her work, but the major influence on this performance was Marling’s arranger, Kate St John.

St John’s orchestrations added subtle energy and imaginative colour, variously matching Marling’s strummed and picked guitar progressions or nudging the songs’ narratives along with muted trumpets, rich basses, sumptuous violas and atmospheric tuned percussion. With a wittily introduced Goodbye England, Marling took her leave, returning for a solo encore and then leaving the orchestra looking a little confused. All in all, though, a good overture to the fortnight that lies ahead.