Meredith Hall, Matthew White, La Nef, Sylvain Bergeron - The Battle of Killiecrankie (2007)

The folk music of Scotland, as well as of other regions whose music has been shaped by the vocabulary of Western concert music, has seen performances that fall along an entire continuum from formal arrangements for voice and piano to pure re-creations of folk practice, with percussion and full-throated singing untouched by classical vocal technique. This attractive Canadian disc falls near the middle of the continuum. The music comes from Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with texts by the likes of Walter Scott and Robert Burns as well as lesser-known and wholly anonymous creators. The music frequently displays the "Scottish snap" syncopated figure that persisted for centuries and gained new life as a stand-in for African rhythms in American blackface minstrelsy. The program is split into the effective division of love and war, with the war half subdivided into music of wars, lamentations, and more war music. Each half contains instrumental pieces as well as vocal solos and duets. Soprano Meredith Hall and countertenor Matthew White, both Canadian, are Baroque and Classical opera specialists, not folk singers, and their light, flowing tone (they blend very nicely in duets) reflects their training in early music. The backing group La Nef, with Baroque violin, lute or Baroque guitar and recorder or cornamuse, gamba, and percussion, also draws on early music, but the prominent percussion in the faster numbers brings the music closer to what you might hear in a pub. The slower pieces are more sparsely accompanied. Perhaps the most remarkable and effective music on the disc is the lengthy programmatic instrumental piece A Highland Battle by composer James Oswald, an interesting figure who fell in between the classical and traditional realms. The battle is followed by the sublimely tragic The Massacre of Glencoe, to a text by Scott, and by a series of instrumental and vocal laments. The Scots texts are translated in the booklet into French but not into English; unlike what one might hear in a Scots pub these days, the English is, however, fully intelligible to outsiders. In this respect, as in others, the performers have steered an intelligent course among the music's various audiences, and in so doing they have devised a performance that will be of interest to folk fans as well as audiences interested in the popular underpinnings of the music of the British Isles in the eighteenth century.