April 22, 2006
At 20, Barra MacNeils still as fresh as ever Family band fabulous in Pops Concert
By Stephen Pederson, Halifax Herald

It's been 20 years since the Barra MacNeils first performed as a family band. The miles ought to show, you'd think. But they don't.  That much was obvious Friday night in the Cohn at the Symphony Nova Scotia Maritime Pops concert.

The band still sounds as fresh as the day they started. The years have only served to fine-tune their performance style. Their show ticks and purrs along as smoothly as a Rolls-Royce engine. 

They have expanded now, but it's all in the family. To the original four of Seamus (keyboards), Kyle (fiddle/guitar/mandolins), Lucy (vocals/harp/bodhran), Stewart (accordion/low and high whistles/Irish flute/vocals) ­ have been added Ryan (Irish pipes/high whistle) and Boyd (bouzouki/vocals).

They make an impressive sound and the variety of instrumental/vocal colour at their command gives  them a formidable technical advantage, which is added to the even bigger advantage of their genetic empathy. Their DNA resonates.

With the fabulous Jamie Gatti on bass, who can pluck out a reel with a sound like warm steel at any tempo you please on the big double-bass, the band's musical cup, already full, runneth over.

As a band, the Barra MacNeils like to work traditional melodies through new and interesting combinations of sonorities, and since they can sing in Gaelic their sonic palette is both rare and worth running through fire for. There is possibly no more haunting repertoire in the entire folk song world.

The atmosphere of the songs is all Nova Scotia spring ­ fresh, bitingly cool, misty, warm in the sun, softly grey ­ full of the vitality that wafts over us from the great ocean on our doorstep.

Musically this translates into drones and karmic drumbeats below, elegantly ornamented tunes on high, and sweetly soaring voices between.

The Barras also, from time to time, like The Chieftans, work an audience into a froth with heterophony ­ all those instrumental timbres lending a tartness to the sound as they wail out blazingly fast reels and bouncing jigs in perfect, breathless unison.

Arrangers pick up on that, increasing the weight by adding symphony fiddles ­ not to mention colouring the arrangements with harmonized lower strings, brass and woodwinds.

Friday night's program included favourites like My Heart's In The Highlands, which you cannot ever hear in your head with any voice but Lucy MacNeil's when you have heard her sing it once; the exquisitely haunting One Wild Rose; and the Gaelic showstopper Gearan Na Maighdinn (The Maiden's Complaint) which includes another MacNeil specialty ­ step dancing a quatre.

Especially moving were David Francey's A Thousand Miles and a transcendently sentimental love song written by Stewart for his wife, Dance With Me Daily.

The second half of the concert began with one of Scott Macmillan's finest arrangements, the MacPherson's Medley, comprised of canonic variations on MacPherson's Blade (Skinner), followed by a simple accumulative arrangement of MacPherson's Lament, the most beautiful tune ever written because it is impossible to play it inexpressively. The SNS violins made it weep.

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