Voices of the World was the title of Thursday night’s show at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall. It couldn’t have been more appropriate. After the Grace, Hewat and Polwarth trio (Corrina Hewat also acted as Mc), solo singer Mairi Smith, the Bulgarian women’s choir Angelite and the Aberfeldy Gaelic choir directed by Margaret Bennett it fell on to us, Fiamma Fumana and the Choir of Mondine di Novi, to finish it. The show has been good right from the start, thanks to the serene beauty of Gaelic singing, the mysterious harmonies of the Bulgarian girls and Margaret’s Elegiac notes (she touched my heart singing a slow song written for her son Martyn, very great piper and dj, our friend and our rather unorthodox muse: he would be 37 if Hodgkin’s lymphoma had not taken him away three years ago). But when the Mondine set foot on the stage something happened: firstly they sing loud, with a sonic pressure that comes straight from pre-microphonic times and makes them the Who of folk choirs (“volume is power”, indeed): and then we came onstage, with our drum grooves and our instruments, to get the people up and dancing. It ended up in a big party.

MUCH later in the evening, in the hotel’s club, the party was still raging on. The ladies stormed a circle of chairs and sofas and started singing like there was no tomorrow, and there was no way to get them to go to bed. Some fans gave them a copule of bottles of whisky, with they took in stride with the elàn that comes with experience (while getting Paolo, normally a good drinker, seriously drunk) between a rice weeding song and a partisan rebel one. Passers by would stop, clustering in a small crowd, and could not believe it. And neither could I, really: a glance at Diva’s wonderful 84 years, still the most powerful contralto in the choir, who was having the time of her life singing at 4 in the morning in a Glasgow hotel, was enough to tell me that something was happening here. I could feel the pride of being there, and the love that bonds us, grandmothers, mothers and daughters (and sons). And I realized that, depite all the limitations (mine especially, as a musician and composer) we have something to tell the world, we have a good story to pass on and our own little note to add to the great song of planet Earth. Forwards!