Laura Marling and the Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Glasgow, gig review: Heavy with fan favourites

Marling was both a worthy headliner and an artist whose sense of understated power commanded rather than hogged the attention

(Alan McAteer)

Capitalising on its position as the largest winter music festival in the UK, Glasgow’s Celtic Connections was determined to make a big first impression with this year’s opening concert.

Initially a folk and roots festival with a largely Scottish and Irish focus, Celtic Connections has expanded over twenty-two years as its profile across the country and amid the London-based press has grown.

These days any international artist whose musical roots may be traced back to the Celtic diaspora, every young and old Scottish act not producing solely on a laptop, and big pop names with a folk influence are all fair game for the extensive three-week bill.

In this context Laura Marling is an obvious choice to play guest of honour at the opening event, although her folk roots are more Home Counties than Highlands. She’s perfectly at home amid the festival, however, and within the unusual environs of a full orchestral show in the company of the Scottish Symphony Orchestra, as conducted by Jules Buckley and arranged by Kate St John.

As is a tradition with Celtic Connections, special commissions and collaborative shows are among the highest-profile events; the pairing worked wonderfully here, with Marling’s cool, disembodied vocal and intricate arrangements – lent extra power by the fact she was working through them with just an acoustic guitar – lifted to epic, cinematic levels by the ranks of string, brass and woodwind players behind her.

Although her much-anticipated sixth album Semper Femina is due in March, this somewhat shortened set of just over an hour was heavy with fan favourites, from the lengthy, unwinding opening half of Once I Was An Eagle (a suite incorporating “Take the Night Off”, “I Was an Eagle”, “You Know” and “Breathe”), and the ferocious, sweary solo encore of “Wild Fire”.

“It’s 2017, now we’ll forget about 2016,” she declared comfortingly, “aside from this…” And a warm tribute version of Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche” was unveiled.

Also orchestrally backed, the first half of the show had acted as a kind of greatest hits of Celtic Connections 2017’s early stages, with the Scots Karine Polwart and Rachel Sermanni, US bluegrass quartet Lindsay Lou and the Flatbellys, and winningly raconteurish Irish troubadour Declan O’Rourke among those represented.

Marling was both a worthy headliner and an artist whose sense of understated power commanded rather than hogged the attention – and the charitable would say her tribute to the rebel spirit of Glasgow coming almost in the same breath as she announced the next song would be “Goodbye England” was a stroke of masterful political satire.