Okay, so I know this is technically speaking a bit off topic, but I HAVE to let y’all know about this.
As part of the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow, BBC Scotland and BBC Radio Nan Gaidheal presented a 2-hour live concert last week at Glasgow City Halls. A VIDEO of the entire concert is now archived on the BBC Scotland website.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/music/celticconnections/whatson/scotlands_music_live.shtml
Lots of terrific highlights to this: the show starts off with Shetland fiddler Chris Stout’s new composition for fiddle and orchestra Dynröst–a thrilling piece by a truly musically bilingual musician. Singer Karine Polwart, who has one of those terrific, dark, rich voices that only Scottish women seem to have sings some great songs. James Graham, a young Gaelic singer from Sutherland does some nice Gaelic songs as well. I thought this bit was really terrific–Sutherland is an area in the NE of Scotland where Gaelic was very nearly dead (linguist Nancy Dorian wrote her famous book, cheerily entitled “Language Death”, about the Sutherland dialect of Gaelic), so it’s wonderful to see a young man from there singing and speaking in such fluent and natural Gaelic. Scottish trad group Dàimh also play some cracking good tunes.
The other great thing about this is that because it’s co-produced with Radio Nan Gaidheal, host Mary Ann Kennedy presents the show bilingually, giving both languages equal time.
For those of you out there who have not heard much Scottish music or can’t understand its appeal in relation to Irish music, I couldn’t think of a better introduction than this.