5/5

In 2009 Bellowhead’s Sam Sweeney was looking for a new fiddle. In luthier Roger Claridge’s Oxford shop he tried out a few and one of them, newly made by one Richard S Howard, seemed to “sing” to him.

Having bought it, when he started playing he noticed a label inside reading “Made in the Great War” and which also had the union flag, the French tricolour and the Russian imperial eagle printed on it. Intrigued, he started to research the history and that’s what this show is all about.

The story’s a poignant one and the performers more than do it justice in this Celtic Connections concert.

Sweeney, fellow Bellowheadian Paul Sartin, multi-instrumentalist Robert Harbron and especially story-teller Hugh Lupton, use contemporary music and history to bring violin-maker and music-hall musician Howard to life.

He was killed in the 1917 first world war battle of Messines and never got to complete his fiddle.

But violin-makers often put a lot of themselves into their work and that’s emphasised both by Lupton’s reworking of the folk tale to tell of a fiddle made out of the bones of Howard’s corpse and by Sweeney’s trip to Flanders to play the violin over his grave.

The touching finale had the audience out of their seats to applaud.

But it is the show’s first half which is perhaps the more fascinating, drawing on  some unexpected links which turned up during the research.

Lupton references Scottish communist poet and songwriter Hamish Henderson who, while collecting travellers’ tales, kept coming across fragments of Greek myth.

Those discoveries link through to story-telling in first world war trenches and the input of public school-educated officers familiar with classical literature.

But by far the most intriguing revelation — at least to this reviewer — that the Irish republican song Off to Dublin in the Green is a lift from a British Army recruiting march. How’s that for irony. It’s one of the many revelatory strands in this show, which will be touring again next September.

Don’t miss.