Celtic Connections: Frigg

City Halls, Glasgow ✪✪✪✪

The powerful fiddle band Frigg, celebrating their 20th birthday and tenth album, are rooted in Finland’s fiddle heartland of Kaustinen but embrace strands of Scandipop, Balkan music and bluegrass – “Nordgrass”, as they say.

And if their introductory set morphed from sighing fiddle harmonies into a reel that seemed to fudge the Scots-nordic cultural divide – well, it was indeed composed by Shetland fiddler Chris Stout.

With four fiddles up front, backed by double bass, guitar and cittern, the septet could shift between hauntingly simple melodies, ethereal interludes and big, wordless vocal choruses, sometimes within a single tune, as in Keidas – “Oasis”.

Stately polskas took on a near-orchestral energy with dramatic upward slides, while an eastern European dance excursion shrilled gleefully. In contrast, the four fiddlers were left unaccompanied for a dreamy pastoral that turned out to be by the English singersongwriter Chris Wood.

Opening the show, the Glasgow-based Anglo-scotsirish-manx quintet Ímar also packed plenty of punch but could have done with changing down a gear or two from time to time.

Led by fiddle, uilleann pipes and concertina, there was no doubting their virtuosity, but their consistently hell-for-leather attack, sometimes with ridiculous levels of bass boom, threw timbre and nuance out the window, although an enthusiastic audience would doubtless disagree.

There was an inventively adroit bodhran solo from percussionist Adam Rhodes, while their final set opened with a fine, keening, Irishsounding air before, inevitably, it was pedal-to-the-metal all the way home.