Burns is as popular and relevant now as ever.
Popular in that his songs – original, collected and reworked (some say stolen) – formed the centrepiece of this year’s Celtic Connections with Eddi Reader, Karen Matheson, Jarlath Henderson and Shona Donaldson joining the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall for a sublime celebration of his life and works – 261 years after his birth.
Current in that the themes at the heart of his poetry, songs and letters – 50 shades of love, man’s inhumanity to man and equality – are universal. And in the case of poverty, literally on our doorstep in the form of a beggar whose breathy refrain of “Can you spare a little change, please?” was drowned out by a rush of tourists fast-tracked from a tartan-liveried bus to a front row seat.
A theme picked up by Karen Matheson in Let Me Wander, a contemporary poem set to music by pianist Donald Shaw and arranged by Este Visser, which contains the lyric: “Life’s no’ worth having if the poor cannae live.”
To the concert… After the house band kicked off proceedings with a brace of reels (The Flower Of Edinburgh and The Wind That Shakes The Barley), conductor John Ashton Thomas took to the stage along with Karen Matheson who like the titular subject of her opening number Bonnie Jean “sang sae joyfully” as she performed a world premiere of the former’s cinematic arrangement of Ca’ The Yowes.
The Celtic connection shifted from Gaelic to Ulster as Jarlath Henderson (the youngest ever winner of the BBC Young Folk Award) whipped up a storm on cittern with Westlin Winds. Before Eddi Reader raised a laugh, the roof and the hairs on the back of the neck with a trio of ballads from her 2003 album Sings The Songs Of Robert Burns (arranged by the late Kevin McCrae) which as the compere Jamie MacDougall rightfully remarked “transformed our cultural perceptions of these works.”
Indeed, so alluring was her rendition of Jamie Come Try Me that when she opened her arms and her heart to let rip with the lyric “Wha wid deny me?”, few in the audience would give her a KB. Including yours truly – and I’m gay!
And to the keyboard warriors who denigrate Burns for being a fornicator, she unleashed a witty one-liner befitting of the bard himself: “Did they never, ever meet Mick Jagger?”
Last but not least, Shona Donaldson (2009 Scots Singer of the Year) who closed the first half and opened the second with new arrangements by Pippa Murphy: Highland Widows Lament and The Slave’s Lament respectively. The latter injected with a defiant resilience, rather than the weary resignation with which it is often associated; but no less haunting.
Karen Matheson then returned to the stage to perform one of the highlights of the evening, the aforementioned Let Me Wander, a moving ballad about “coming to the end of your days”. Before lifting our spirits with one of her favourite Burns songs, notably recorded by the legendary Andy Stewart, Johnny Lad.
Continuing the theme of spirit, albeit liquid rather than mood, Jarlath Henderson followed up the plaintive First Do No Harm with a rollicking composition inspired by an “alcoholic experience in a jacuzzi” (fittingly entitled Jaboozy) and Green Grow The Rashes O in which, as he quoted from Michael Marra, “Burns made the very shocking reference in his age that – God is a woman!”
The perfect set-up for Eddi Reader’s life-affirming finale of John Anderson My Jo, Ae Fond Kiss and Willie Stewart which brought the audience to their feet with a moving encore of The Tannahill Weavers’ version of Auld Lang Syne. In the introduction to which she leaned over to the band and asked casually, “Can you give me an A?” To which I would add – plus!
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