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COME January and the post-festive gloom, Glasgow, in any normal year, comes alive with Europe’s biggest winter music festival. Every year Celtic Connections welcomes music lovers in their droves to its showcase of folk and roots music from throughout Scotland and the world. However, 2021, needless to say, is not a “normal” year. With coronavirus cases on the rise, and with mass immunisation a future promise rather than a present reality, the festival’s creative producer Donald Shaw and his team had to make the painful decision to shift their great live music programme online. They “left it as long as possible”, Shaw says, before finally conceding that a live festival wasn’t going to happen. It was in October, he explains, that they concluded that the Covid omens were not good.
Celtic Connections is going online a week today - for a 19 day festival By Louise Glen
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Updated: 10:19, 08 January 2021
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The Celtic Connections online festival will begin one week today.
Across 19 days, the festival will present over 30 online performances between Friday January 15 and Tuesday February 2 2021.
St Lukes. Picture: Gaelle Beri
World class concerts will be available to view online with some of the biggest names on the Scottish music scene and beyond appearing on screens across the world as part of the winter festival.
By Sean Smith, BostonIrish Contributor
December 28, 2020
Sean Smith, BostonIrish Contributor
While its focus tends to be on traditional and contemporary Scottish music, the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow also features music from Ireland and other countries.
With live music – as we know it, anyway – in stasis these past several months, many venues, organizations, and artists have turned to virtual formats for presenting performances, whether through livestreaming or pre-recorded concerts. That includes Irish/Celtic music, as witnessed by GBH’s 2020 “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn” and the annual BCMFest, which will take place January 14-18 [see story elsewhere on the Boston Irish site].
WINNERS of the annual MG ALBA Scots Trad Music Awards were announced on a special show on BBC ALBA on Saturday. The usually live event featured special performances from some of traditional music’s top luminaries, including The Iona Fyfe Trio, Project Smok, Deirdre Graham, Jarlath Henderson and Karen Matheson as well as Phil Cunningham. Hosted by Alistair Heather and Mary Ann Kennedy, the event had been set to take place in Dundee’s Caird Hall, but Hands Up for Trad worked to support artists and provide an alternative platform, culminating in two special programmes of Na Trads on BBC ALBA.