By Stephen Cooke - Halifax Herald
SYDNEY - With advance ticket sales up 10 per cent over last year and 20 shows already sold out, the 2004 Celtic Colours International Festival was off to a flying start, before a bow had even touched a set of strings.
And on Friday night at Sydney's Centre 200, the festival's gala opening concert proved worthy of the increased interest, giving the audience some pomp and circumstance along with the usual cross-section of some of the week's top talent from home and abroad.
Things kicked off in high style with the Gaelic College of St. Anns Pipe and Drum Band, directed by pipe major Bruce MacPhee, providing an appropriate highland fanfare for Lt.-Gov. Myra Freeman.
Calling Celtic Colours "a memorable lifetime experience," the lieutenant- governor praised the volunteers who keep things running in front of and behind the scenes, making the whole island a community of friends and neighbours for nine days.
After a stately fling - complete with swords - by the Forrester Scottish Dancers, an even older tradition was brought forth by Kingsville Gaelic singer Jeff MacDonald, performing a song from the 1800s by Jonathan G. MacKinnon. 
Translated, the words talk about a love of the land, saying "Many waves will wash our shores before I chose to leave them," a sentiment MacDonald has been reinforcing in Cape Breton schools, informing students about Celtic music and Gaelic heritage.
Celtic Colours' artists-in-residence David Milligan and Corrina Hewat jumped the concert ahead a couple of centuries under the banner of their Scottish group Bachue, with percussionist David Hay.
Milligan is a jazz pianist reconstructing folk melodies while Hewat grounds the compositions with her sparkling harp work and willowy alto voice.
The Banks of the Nile was a familiar tune about a soldier's love who cuts her hair short and dons a uniform to join his regiment, and sees the horror of war first hand, made completely contemporary by its images of death in the desert.
The instrumental Rumble a Bellyful had an insistant Latin flavour - imagine if Chick Corea was originally a MacCorea - while a collaboration with the festival's local artist-in-resident Gordie Sampson on guitar provided a bit of a sneak preview for The Unusual Suspects, a massive Celtic supergroup that performs at Glace Bay's Savoy Theatre on Friday and again at Mabou's Strathspey Place on Saturday afternoon.
Sampson then switched to piano for a quick solo spot, performing his haunting tune Paris, soon to become a recording by country superstar Faith Hill. Gala co-host Ian MacNeil remarked that he was there when Sampson got the phone call that Hill would be including Paris in some of her live shows, and that Sampson himself has been performing in s
ome prestigious places lately, although not in L.A. (Lake Ainslie, that is).
Making their second visit to Celtic Colours, Danish duo Harold Haugaard and Martin Hoirup played a tasty set of fiddle and guitar tunes marked by that unique North European combination of merry and melancholy melodies.
Their unique timing and rhythmic intuition is reminiscent of the teaming of Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser and guitarist Tony McManus, but playing Danish waltzes and even a bit of Russian dance instead of Celtic jigs and reels.
An extra bonus was the introduction of singer Helene Blum, whose crystaline voice lent a delicate beauty to a ballad of a girl whose heart is won and lost at a harvest ball and adds a wordless vocal to the skipping rhythm of Haugaard and Hoirup's final reel.
Also returning was Perthshire's Dougie MacLean, a consummate entertainer whose songs explore the darker side of human nature on I'll Never Understand and the persistance of family traits in Talking With My Father.
His love of the land shone through in I Feel So Near, inspired by a storm-tossed stay on the Isle of Lewis, augmented by a harmonica worn Bob Dylan-style in an approximation of what he jokingly called "Scottish cool."
MacLean's last song of the evening, You Must Not Lie Down, spoke of being "lost in the fiddle's sweet sound," which is what the Barra MacNeils delivered in spades as the gala's finale act.
Opening with a bracing double-fiddle medley featuring Kyle MacNeil and his sister, an eight-months-pregnant Lucy MacNeil, the Barras delivered a crowd-pleasing set for the home town audience, including popular favourites like The Coal Town Road and Don't Call Me Early in the Morning.
Augmented by brothers Boyd and Ryan from Slainte Mhath, the quintet (including Jamie Gatti on bass) gave a preview of its recently recorded upcoming CD in the form of a Dougie MacDonald fiddle tune with a dark, mysterious tone, segueing into a bright and shiny finish.
Another Dougie, the returning MacLean, joined the Barras for a moment that best sums up the whole Celtic Colours experience, with his gentle burr joining Lucy's aching lilt on Caledonia, a homesick ode to a birthplace that applies as well to Cape Breton as it does to Scotland.
Caught up in the moment, Lucy remarked that she was so excited about singing with MacLean that her expected Halloween baby might become a Thanksgiving baby instead.
Just in case, there was a doctor in the house in the form of Premier John Hamm, who also performed the intermission draw for a plaque signed by all the artists (so you can't say he's never given anything to Nova Scotians).
The opening gala may be a dressed up affair, but back at the Festival Club at the Gaelic College of St. Anns, Friday night became Saturday morning in a relaxed atmosphere, with the wit and melody of pipes and harp duo Pipeline, the French Canadian cheek - and hurdy gurdy - of lively quartet Le Vent du Nord, and finally an all-star Cape Breton assembly including guitarists Sampson and Patrick Gillis, fiddlers Andrea Beaton and Shelley Campbell, and Cheryl Smith on drums. No two acts the same, but all embodying the vibrant spirit one of the best festivals in North America.
Lost in fiddle's sweet sound
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