Celtic Connections: Su-a Lee: Dialogues
Glasgow City Halls - 30/01/24
Disruption on the railways meant that your reviewer was only able to see the first half of this concert, but it felt like a show in itself. Cellist Su-a Lee is the embodiment of the different currents running through musical life in Scotland. As she said she would normally be seen in the City Halls every Friday night during the SCO’s season. On this occasion, however, she was very much front and centre and moving seamlessly between traditional music and new, contemporary work drawing on traditional themes. Lee, encouraged by her partner Hamish Napier, conceived during the lockdown the idea of a ‘solo’ album that celebrated friendships and elevated the voice of the cello. That she was able to assemble the cast she did for the album and again for its live expression is testament to the esteem in which she is held across the genres.
The evening opened with a tribute to the late Kevin McRae, a former colleague in the SCO, and another cellist who opened up pathways from the tight discipline of orchestral work to the looser discipline of the world of traditional music. Lee’s reading of McRae’s arrangement of ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, used the cello’s many registers to full effect, exploring subtle variations in that iconic melody. Then came the dialogues: piano with Donald Shaw’s baroque with a modern harmonic twist, and James Ross’s Stroma, a tribute to his Caithness origins. For the Ross piece the duo was joined by an A-team of Donald Grant on violin, Patsy Reid on viola, and Natalie Haas on cello, the latter described as a ‘hero of the folk cello’ who changed the idea of the role of the instrument in folk music.
Haas stayed on stage for the outstanding number of the set when Karine Polwart joined the cello crew for a performance of the old ballad, ‘Mill o Tifty’s Annie’, evoking as much pity and terror as any Greek tragedy. Patriarchy and class combined to seal the fate of the protagonists with all the drama of the piece fully realised in the cellos’ outlining of the contours of the tale, delivered unerring and true by one of Scottish music’s great voices.
The half ended with the whole ‘Dialogues’ company assembling on stage to deliver a strathspey and reel celebrating the Lee and Napier’s Badenoch home, with that idea of elevating the voice of the cello well and truly established.