Celtic Connections

Chris Stout & Catriona McKay

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Rob Adams

FIVE STARS

The programming was perfect. Three Swedish musicians, playing a string-supplier’s dream of five-string fiddle, nyckelharpa, its smaller cousin, the moraharpa, and a sixteen-string harpguitar, brought baroque-flavoured folk tunes into the here and now with a gorgeous collective tone, beautifully executed arrangements and wonderful joie de vivre.

Just how apt Emma Ahlberg, Ek Daniel and Niklas Roswall were as the opening act was underlined when they joined Chris Stout and Catriona McKay for an encore that married spontaneity and mastery, two of the ingredients that make Shetland fiddler Stout and harper supreme McKay such a thrilling partnership.

Just as the Swedes give old tunes a current glow, Stout and McKay draw on the tradition and look for new places to take it. Melodies are examined and explored in every nuance in a conversation that sees roles interchange across a dynamic range that can move through the gears from feather-bowed murmur to choppy harp storm-cum-raging fiddle torrent or switch between these extremes in a fingersnap.

The sense that they might, at times, be communing with the spirits was enhanced by Stout’s Tingaholm, its keening fiddle intro conveying the atmosphere of the old Norse parliament’s Shetland location, whereas a reel for contemporary dedicatee, concert pianist Barry Douglas, suggested carousal possibilities with palpable physicality and verve and stop-on-a-sixpence mutual understanding.

What lies behind an unnamed Brazilian tune wasn’t vouchsafed but its feeling of longing – or saudade, as its writer or subject might put it – along with the ease with which they slipped into the joint finale’s polska confirmed that the immense depth of expression that Stout and McKay impart is remarkably transferable.