Dugald MacIntyre presents the Glasgow Highland Club medal to Iain Speirs
Caileach an Dutain 5 Niall Stewart, High Level,Thief of Lochaber Judges for all events: S Shedden,N Mulvie, WMorrison.TheVote of Thanks was given by Beathag Mhoireasdan and the Announcer was John MacPhee.
Archie Kenneth Quaich, March 3
RSPS Rooms, Edinburgh
Peter McCalister concludes his report from the AKQ: Alasdair Morrison also played the Viscount. His bari was very open.The only comment on the tune was the cadences which were not consistent – and he tended to rush into the note following the cadence. An excellent bagpipe to start with, which drifted a little, but was not distracting. Tom Graham struggled a bit with
arguably the biggest tune of the day, Ronald MacDonald of Morar. He started very slowly, and there was no speeding up of the doubling of the Urlar norVar 1. He missed
55
a line or two in the C variation, and the a- mach was leaning towards self-composition. Nick Tuckey played Corrienessan. The Urlar and Var 1 were a wee bit slow – shorter semi-quavers would have sorted that. T was also on the slow side but consistent and the C variation was great (though the cadences were overlong at times), and the drones had drifted a bit by this point. The pipes weren’t quite ‘locked in’ at the outset. Kerr Cowan played Too Long in This Condition which he declared to all was his “signature tune”.He crushed a few movements and phrases throughout, mainly edre, darid, hiodin, and as these occur a lot the effect was to interrupt the flow of the melody. Pipes were nice to start with but the F and high A were a bit sharp and cuts to the bottom hand led to a squeal. I think he should bin that chanter reed! Michael McGowan also had Corrienessan and things were going very well when he sadly got lost inVar 1 doubling. He played the T variation “down” which is fine, but with not enough theme note, so that the predominant note became low A. His C movement was missed a few times and it was the D gracemote finger that was visably staying still.There were a few chokes form a powerful pipe. As one would expect, Alan Forbes did justice to Donald Duaghal MacKay.The F was a wee bit flat. Ground andVar 1 were rather similar in tempo, and I would have the same comment on contrast between the singling/doubling of theT and C variations,but this was certainly a very nice tune. John Frater then played the Old Men of the Shells. Apart from a couple of tiny technical faults (one hiodin and one hiharin) this was clearly the best tune of the day so far. Pipes were very nice to start with and you could hardly hear the minor fluctuation in tuning which did occur. B echoes were slightly clipped in T and C singlings, but the ending of the tune was great.Ray Bell had the nicest drones of