Celtic Connections
The Macmath Collective & Kirsty Law
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Rob Adams
three stars
TWO projects at different stages in their development shared the Strathclyde Suite stage on Tuesday. Borders-based Kirsty Law’s Young Night Thought borrows poems and fragments from writers including Robert Louis Stevenson, who provided the title, and Lady Nairne and works them into songs with visual as well as musical accompaniment.
It’s a work-in-progress for now, with an album due later this year, and Law’s singing betrayed some early nerves. She was well served by her musicians, however, especially fiddler Rona Wilkie who added nuance, vibrancy and appropriate darkness to pieces ranging from street songs to eerie portrayals.
William Macmath was a Galloway-born, Edinburgh-based clerk whose life changed majorly when he read an advertisement in a periodical in which a Harvard professor asked for traditional songs to be collected and sent to him. The professor, Francis James Child, is now much better remembered than Macmath but the latter’s contribution to the hugely influential Child Ballad collections remains significant and in setting up and recording the Macmath Collective, the Dumfries & Galloway arts worker and choir director Alison Burns has given him his rightful place in the enterprise.
With narration and amusing characterisation from poet Tom Pow, a cast of six singers and musicians from the area brought the songs Macmath collected off the page with due care and no little energy. Singers Robyn Stapleton and Emily Smith delivered contrasting tales, the former following the tragic Queen Jane with the slightly bawdy John Blunt, and the latter singing the daft I Saw the Snail with enthusiastic charm before bringing real weight and assurance to the Queen of the Fairies.
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