Having helped keep the festival flag flying last year in EIF’s online project My Light Shines On, Breabach didn’t need asking twice to come and perform for an actual live audience this year. And judging by the reaction and the greetings exchanged as they arrive on stage, the Highlands and Islands five-piece are back among friends here.
Some things have changed for the band during lockdown, like having a new member to introduce us to – Conal McDonagh on bagpipes and whistle. But plenty hasn’t, including the polish of their performance. No ring-rustiness here. They deliver faultless, easy-on-the-ear modern folk. It’s no surprise they’ve been chosen as representatives of the home team at the International Festival. They project an almost focus-grouped image of 21st Century Scotland: confident in its roots, yet outward-looking (as on their migrant song Birds of Passage), freely bilingual, and entirely devoid of cultural cringe, deploying double bagpipes and, in the case of piper Calum MacCrimmon, tartan trews. They showcase some tracks from Dùsgadh (meaning “awakening”), a folkloric collaboration with animator Cat Bruce, with a sound that paints landscapes in your mind’s eye. This is Scottish cultural soft power writ large.
It’s all a little too pristine this evening though. The clinical atmosphere in the marquee can’t be helped, distancing restrictions being what they are, but there isn’t the right charisma coming off the stage to break down the space between us. The show takes on the formal air of a classical concert, and though the band urge us to clap along, and the toes can’t help but tap, it never quite stirs the soul like it might in less straitened surroundings.
The Last March, a tune found on the keyboard of late Cape Breton musician, John Morris Rankin after he died, provides an evocative moment and Òran Bhràigh Rùsgaich is gorgeous, the homesick yearning in Megan Henderson’s voice cutting through the atmosphere and melting our hearts. The boys in the band mix things up with some percussive beats on their stringed instruments and there are some barnstorming pipe and whistle blasts. But the sense we’re being schooled in folk is never far away, particularly when Henderson dons dancing shoes and we’re told this is one in the step dance tradition of the west of Scotland. All very lovely, all very well performed, everything in its right place. It’s just very, very wholesome.