My final concert at Celtic Connections 2013 took me full circle to where I started with Carlos Núñez, although this time with a totally different repetoire. I only decided last minute to see if there were any tickets left and was so glad that I managed to get one.

Philip Pickett is a renowned performer of period pieces and with the Musicians of the Globe, they cover music from the Elizabethan & Jacobean period.  (At this point I was getting very strange looks from Danny Matheson).  However, as a historian at heart, I had some idea of what I was going to see and I was certainly not disappointed.

There were a total of eight musicians on stage:  five including Philip,  playing the Baroque guitar, Baroque violin, bass viola, lute and various recorders. Whilst the other three consisted of Carlos – again with his brother on percussion and his

guitarist.

In the first half the pieces were mainly sedate tunes, which if you closed your eyes, you could envisage the Royal Court of the time dancing to them in all their finery.

For the second half there were many more traditional Scottish and Irish jigs, reels, rants, hornpipes and haunting ballads interspersed with dialogue between Carlos and Philip describing the hostilities between the Spanish and the English in Elizabethan times and how songs developed from this.

Carlos then played a piece on his “Pastoral” pipes which were a hybrid pipe used both in Scotland and Ireland. Needless to say Carlos was not allowed to go without one of  his classic piping tunes which got the audience on their feet.

It was a wonderful concert ending in two encores and two standing ovations for all of the musicians.

Ruth Roy