SUE WILSON catches up with the far-traveled young musicians of Fèis Rois on the Edinburgh Fringe.

AS Fèis Rois gears up for its 25th anniversary next year – buoyed by a 13% increase in attendance at its 2009/10 weekly classes, and busier than ever with other new and ongoing projects – it's also celebrating a decade since the launch of its summer Ceilidh Trail.

This offers outstanding senior Fèis participants, selected by audition, a week's intensive training followed by a three-week taster of life as a professional touring ensemble, via a hectic schedule of concerts, ceilidhs, sessions and functions.

It's a win-win model, simultaneously offering both tourists and locals a winningly youthful taste of quality traditional music, and one that has now been widely copied around the Highlands. This year Fèis Rois undertook both its regular Ross-shire Ceilidh Trail, which plied the region from Achiltibuie to Cromarty, and an international version.

Starting out with a gig at the Hebridean Celtic Festival, the latter line-up also performed as Fèis movement ambassadors at the Áras Éanna arts centre on Galway's Aran Islands, the Cambridge Folk Festival and the National Eisteddfod in Wales.

Both groups then came together for this Edinburgh Festival Fringe concert, of which the first half highlighted Fèis Rois's active partnerships with youth music projects elsewhere in the country. Opening the proceedings were a quintet of 10 to 12-year-olds, then the eight-piece Trad for Teens posse, both from the Edinburgh Youth Gaitherin (EYG), whose own 15th anniversary falls this year, and which now also runs an extensive year-round programme across the capital as well as its original Easter school.

Besides the budding talents on display, it was strikingly evident that the EYG's tuition, from the earliest stages, incorporates highly contemporary arrangements and rhythmic approaches, alongside traditional techniques, abetted by its equal favouring of old and newly-written tunes.

This can only be of help in keeping participants interested through those tricky teenage years, whereby the past/present cross-fertilisation naturally continues, as was vibrantly apparent from the older group, whose deftly funked-up dance tunes and atmospherically arrayed slower numbers featured banjo, piano, accordion, bodhran and double bass as well as several fiddles.

Similarly impressive – all the more so since they've only been meeting for eight months – was the North-East Folk Collective, from rural Aberdeenshire. These nine young players, on fiddles, accordion, bass, guitar, mandolin, piano and vocals, spanned both EYG age-ranges, and delivered a tight, lively set that ranged from a Scott Skinner strathspey (with a blues'n'boogie twist), via the cajun/adopted-Irish 'Happy One-Step' to Sandy Mathers's reel 'Repeal the Poll Tax', plus an assured, soulful version of Dylan's 'Wagon Wheel': clearly no issues with musical history here.

After the interval, the two Fèis Rois ensembles – dubbed the 'Red Team' and the 'Blue Team', according to the colour of their T-shirts – took their turns, starting with the five-piece Ross-shire group, comprising Eilidh Ramsay (fiddle/vocals), Alexander Levack (pipes/whistles), Siannie Moodie (clarsach), Alasdair Paul (guitar/bouzouki) and Kirsty-Anne Macfarlane (accordion).

Three weeks' touring seemed to have redoubled rather than sapped their onstage energy and enthusiasm, as well as imbuing their performance with a confidence and cohesion that only such road-testing can bring, with the lead melody players' snug, radiant consonance backed by Paul and Moodie's punchy, agile rhythm work and adroit chord colours.

Even in such talented company, Levack's whistle playing stood out particularly strongly, while Macfarlane's clear, ardent singing, in Andy Mitchell's 'Indiana', brightly transcended the somewhat cheesy lyrics.

The international quartet – Kari Macleod (fiddle/vocals), Ewan Duncan (pipes/whistles), Iain-Gordon Macfarlane (fiddle/guitar) and Mischa MacPherson (fiddle/Gaelic song) – sounded by comparison a little more subdued, or fatigued, perhaps by the additional travel or all the big occasions, with a fraction less spark and synergy in their instrumental sets.

They excelled, nonetheless, with their vocal material – first a beautifully handled, hauntingly jazz-tinged rendition of Burns's 'Slave's Lament' from Macleod (even if someone needs to correct her on its history), then a traditional Gaelic love-song delivered with deeply felt sweetness and gravitas by MacPherson, before a final rousing set of puirt-a-beul.

Both teams then joined forces for an excellent medley of Gordon Duncan tunes – exemplifying the demanding level of material they tackled throughout – before inviting all their younger guests back for a genuinely all-inclusive finale, which once again highlighted the inspiring accomplishments and promise of Scottish music's coming generations.

© Sue Wilson, 2010

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