Celtic Connections review: Chris Thile & BBC SSO: Attention!, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Composed and performed by US mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile, Attention! provided a zany opening to this year’s Celtic Connections festival, writes Jim Gilchrist

Chris Thile & BBC SSO: Attention!, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall ***

Manic mandolinist delivers orchestrated stream of consciousness, drives conductor to drink … Seriously though, Chris Thile’s Attention! – “a narrative song cycle for extroverted mandolinist and orchestra” – proved to be a work of zany musical theatre, by turns exuberant, bewildering and at times indulgent.

It opened with Thile singing the plaintive Appalachian song Little Birdie then stopping the orchestra for a couple of staged mandolin re-tunings, before continuing on this picaresque account of his formative years as a musician. Loping about the stage, he sang and hollered, slipping in and out of his trademark falsetto while discharging dazzling mandolin flurries, recounting a critical gig at a San Diego music convention and his youthful fixation with actress Carrie Fisher (cue orchestral Star Wars outburst).

Conductor Stephen Bell steered an admirably game BBC SSO through dramatic eruptions or empathetic shimmers, as well as chorusing, clapping and, on occasion dancing, while Bell himself accepted a swig of Thile’s favoured IPA. All part of the show, as was audience recruitment to help extemporise a mandolin cadenza, which duly rang out with characteristic brio, while his star-stuck confrontation with Fisher elicited an undeniably lovely rendition of Princess Leia’s theme.

There was also a fiddle-mandolin shootout with violinist Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, while, providing vocal responses, Sarah Jarosz’s considerable talents seemed sadly obscured, although she and Thile delivered a rip-roaring bluegrass encore. Overall, we were entertained, bemused and not always convinced.

Sørensen’s peerless trio Dreamers’ Circus had opened the evening with a set of delicate tunes that gathered heft, followed by singer-songwriter Rachel Sermanni with a similarly short but elegantly articulated clutch of songs, her closing Lay My Heart enlisting the audience in a moment of serenity before mandolin mayhem ensued.