Oran Mor, Glasgow Star rating: *** After its celebration of the Mendelssohn bicentenary last week, Oran Mor's A Concert, A Cocktail and A Canape series marked the Chinese New Year with the Scottish Philharmonic joined by Chinese-Scottish traditional group the Harmony Ensemble. Such east-meets-west fusion needs to be handled with extreme care, as several concerts at Celtic Connections demonstrated.

Oran Mor, Glasgow
Star rating: ***
After its celebration of the Mendelssohn bicentenary last week, Oran Mor's A Concert, A Cocktail and A Canape series marked the Chinese New Year with the Scottish Philharmonic joined by Chinese-Scottish traditional group the Harmony Ensemble. Such east-meets-west fusion needs to be handled with extreme care, as several concerts at Celtic Connections demonstrated.

That this programme worked could be attributed to two factors: the small size of the SPO strings, which balanced the western classical and Chinese traditional performers, and the presence in the latter group of Eddie McGuire. The versatile composer, arranger and folk musician - who on this occasion played both the flute and the flute-like Chinese dizi - is one of the few musicians to have negotiated consistently the thorny hinterland territory of classical-traditional crossover.

Among the Harmony Ensemble's performances of traditional Chinese pieces, which featured singer Fong Liu in the utterly distinctive, harsh-edged tone and stylised gesture of Beijing Opera, arrangements by McGuire and other Harmony Ensemble members for the SPO kept the spirit and flavour of the traditional music, presented in a more westernised tonality.

There was even a new work; Zweisamkeit V by Ip Kim-Ho, based on Chinese music's textures and discords.

Slickly presented, this was a programme in which the unusual was made accessible without compromise.

Only the Fishing Song from the Sketches from North China's Ethnic Areas yueqin (Chinese lute) concerto was written in the soupy, heavily western-influenced style familiar from works such as the Yellow River Concerto - and even that wasn't the worst example of its kind, especially with the added interest of soloist Chuang Cheng-Ying's otherworldly countertenor accompaniment at its close.