Categories: festivals
Tags: Celtic Connections
Date: 22 January 2012 16:56:40
It's that time of year again - mid-January through to the beginning of February Glasgow hosts the fantastic Celtic Connections music festival, with amazing musicians from Scotland and way way beyond. We are due to go to 7 concerts, 2 of them we have seen already. First up on Friday night was Cuairt nan Eilann (Gaelic for 'a tour round the islands'), featuring 3 Gaelic singers plus a couple of fiddles, flute/whistle and guitar. The musicians were all fantastic and Gaelic is such a beautiful language, it was a brilliant night. I think I preferred the more lively stuff, but it was all wonderful.
Then last night we were at the Concert Hall for the 10th anniversary party/concert for Quebecois band Le Vent du Nord. We'd seen them twice before at the festival and so knew we were in for a great night, and they didn't disappoint. They were on stage throughout, and had 3 other groups in various combinations join them for particular songs. Two of them we'd also seen before (Breabach from Scotland and Vasen from Sweden - or at least we'd seen the nykkelharpa guy from Vasen there before), the other band was Dervish from Ireland. It was all just fantastic, what an excellent night.
Celtic Connections isn't great for the bank balance, but is so worth the money. It's one of the highlights of the year - we've been to loads of CC gigs over the past few years, and not been to a single dud yet.