Up Late With Donald Shaw, EIF music review – 'an exuberant pipe and fiddle-led finale'

MUSIC

Up Late With Donald Shaw ★★★★

The Hub

The last of the Hub concert series brought the Festival to a resounding close as Donald Shaw, accordionist, pianist and artistic director of that other festival in the west, Celtic Connections, curated a nine-strong ensemble of some of Scotland’s most notable folk musicians, plus guest singers.

Arrangements were tight and well considered, with varying permutations of players ensuring shifting instrumental colours, Ross Ainsley and Fraser Fifield adding pipes and whistles (plus Fifield’s saxophone) to the mix, and keen fiddling from Shaw’s Capercaillie colleague Charlie McKerron and Patsy Reid, the latter joining cellist Su-a Lee in a sprightly strathspey set.

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Two young guest singers brought a more contemporary vibe, with Beth Malcolm including her own plaintive Northwards and Michael Cassidy singing wryly What a Perfect Way for the World to End. It was the spirited tune sets, however, that prevailed, drummer James Mackintosh and guitarists Tim Edey and Mark Clements tightly underpinning jigs and reels, while Ainsley’s Highland pipes brought anthemic grandeur to The Silver Whistle.

To close, in a moving tribute to the renowned Sandy Denny, who died in 1978 but would have been 80 this year, her song Farewell, Farewell was given ardent voice by Malcolm, before an exuberant pipe and fiddle-led finale.

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