Celtic Connections New Voices, Roo Geddes

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 25/1/2026

Celtic Connections New Voices, Roo Geddes

Roo Geddes (violin), Caroline Dressler (violin), Natalie Haas (cello), Ugo Franco (guitar, mandolin), Timmy Allen (guitar, double bass), Neil Sutcliffe (accordion, piano)

Violinist Roo Geddes is one of a growing cohort of young musicians equally at home in the classical world and in traditional music, with technique to spare but with a feel for folk traditions. This New Voices featured music composed by Geddes during a sojourn in India last year. Notwithstanding their place of origin, the compositions which he presented ranged across a number of different sources of inspiration, not least contemporary classical music.

The opening piece set off with a sweeping air which segued into a mandolin-led passage which itself wound up in discordant, jazz-inflected territory. Geddes demonstrated a playful approach to his material throughout, for example with a gypsy jazz influenced piece which also incorporated a jig (of sorts) and a strathspey (of sorts) as he and his crack band had fun both with form and rhythm.

The centrepiece of the concert was a composition which Geddes described as a raag, the scalar basis of improvisation in Indian music. This particular raag was based on a traditional story of two lovers separated, represented here by two notes in the scale that were omitted until they were reunited at the end. What emerged was a piece of shifting textures which displayed some immaculate musicianship from the ensemble and gave some space to stunning duets with Geddes’s regular musical partners, accordionist Neil Sutcliffe and the guitarist Timmy Allen, as well as showcasing the other musicians and the composer’s own considerable chops on violin. It was a musical adventure defying the listener to predict where you were being taken next.

Here was music-making of the highest calibre, and the emergence of a potentially significant Scottish composer.