The title is a bit of a mouthful but we did go to this very nice concert in Bad Homburg. Many thanks to Sigurd for the tickets!

The protagonists here are Eryn Rae (fiddle), Mairi McGillivray (voice), Ailis Sutherland (pipes, flute) and Pablo Lafuente (guitar). (Mr Lafuente's dad is Spanish but his mum is Scots so that's OK. Anyway, he plays the guitar with the sort of gusto otherwise mostly found in the Iberian peninsula.) Petra Eisenberger of Concert Connections has enrolled them on a grueling tour of Germany, Liechtenstein and Switzerland – today is only the second night out of thirty altogether but apparently they played in Coesfeld yesterday and will play in Oldenburg tomorrow, so chances are they'll see a lot of Germany in the next four weeks. Mostly motorways, hotel rooms and concert venues, but mainly motorways as the pattern continues. Fans of Scottish folk music in the Rhine-Main area can look forward to another appearance of the quartet in Rödermark on 22 March, but otherwise they will probably just zoom past Frankfurt multiple times as they're criss-crossing the country. (But hey, a young musician's gotta make a living somehow!)

So it's probably just as well that we're seeing them while they're still relatively fresh – but OTOH the audience in Rödermark will likely get the benefit of them having played together virtually every single night for three weeks. (They seem to have the night of the 17th off, so perhaps they can find an Irish pub somewhere along the 374 kilometres between Langenau and Trier and join a session there to celebrate St Pat's day.) The concert opens, after an extended introduction by Ms Eisenberger, with Eryn Rae and Pablo Lafuente. Each of the three ladies gets a 15-minute slot to play together with Lafuente and his guitar, then after a 20-minute break during which CDs and other merchandise are on sale, all four musicians play together for the second half of the concert. (Where “together” means either the bagpipes or Mairi McGillivray's vocals but – for obvious reasons – not both at the same time. Fortunately Ailis Sutherland is also a very accomplished player of the Irish wooden flute and a beautiful singer in her own right, so she can make herself useful in the band even when she's not playing the pipes. OTOH, when she's not singing herself, Mairi McGillivray has nothing else to do.) All of this is not meant to disparage the four in any way – they're all masters of their respective instruments, which in McGillivray's case means singing mostly in Scottish Gaelic, and they certainly picked some cracking tunes to play together; some of the rough edges that can still occasionally be heard in the joint sets will certainly come off as the tour continues.

The venue – the Kulturzentrum Englische Kirche in the middle of Bad Homburg's central district, between the posh main shopping street and the lush Kurpark – is filled almost to capacity. Whether this tour will, as the programme leaflet claims and Ms Eisenberger reiterates, fulfill its secondary mission to get German youth – which according to the leaflet is dominated by digital media and consumerism – interested in playing music (Scottish or otherwise) is anyone's guess, but perhaps the concert audience (average age 50+) can wreak their kids' or grandkids' attention away from Tiktok long enough to pass that message on.

The concert organisers have also accomplished the minor miracle of completing an official tour CD in time, which – for people like us who still own CD players – brings together two tracks from each of the four musicians with three tracks that were specially recorded by the four for this tour. This of course implies that the other eight tracks feature them together with completely different musicians from their usual line-ups, because the tracks are presumably borrowed from other CDs. But no matter, it's still great music! “Buy CDs” is also the running joke of the first half of the concert as every performer in turn exhorts the audience to avail themselves of the merchandise stand during the break. (But hey, a young musician's gotta make a living somehow! They have a production run of a thousand CDs to sell and four weeks to do it.)

Anyway, a great night out (in spite of all the snark). We're back home at 11.15pm, in time to watch the evening news courtesy of the ARD-Mediathek and relax with a celebratory dram.