With recent achievements as young as12, such as the Traditional Music School of Excellence in Plockton's latest CD and the massed participation of school pupils in Celtic Connections' opening concert, Harvest, contestants in the Young Traditional Musician of the Year's catchment age group 16-25 are beginning to look like veterans.

It is little surprise then that this year's final featured one of the strongest fields yet, making the judges' job of choosing a winner no enviable task. All six contestants were experienced performers with their own musical personalities, all well capable of putting their own interpretations into tunes and songs and each contributing to the entertainment value of an evening that each year becomes increasingly more nerve-wracking for the audience than it appears to be for the tremendously assured and often jocularly nonchalant performers.

The six represented a wide geographical spread, with James Graham from Lochinver becoming the first male - and first Gael - winner through his commanding performance of Gaelic song beginning with a beautiful rendering of Murdo MacFarlane's anthem Canan Nan Gaidheal.

Shetlander Jenna Reid had set a cracking pace with her explosive fiddle playing. Tom Orr, the self-styled farmer's boy from Lanark displayed brilliantly intricate finger work on the accordion as well as much humour. Skye-born Sarah Naylor entertained with Gaelic song and a fiddle style that ran a gamut from gentle slow air to rough-hewn reel. Edinburgh clarsach player combined a refined technique with mirthful Scots song, and Shona Donaldson's north-east origins in Huntly shone through in her excellent fiddle playing and ballad singing.

Rob Adams

Review: The Scotsman ****

GAELIC singer James Graham from Lochinver beat off strong competition to become the first male Young Scots Traditional Musician of the Year, with a set of impeccably performed songs. The six finalists delivered a richly entertaining concert, and each provided yet more evidence of the remarkable growth in standards in traditional music in recent years.

Three of the contenders were fiddle players who also sang, and each brought a distinctive stylistic approach to proceedings. Jenna Reid comes out of the Shetland tradition, Sarah Naylor is a West Coast stylist from Skye, and Shona Donaldson of Huntly belongs to the north-east tradition. Each displayed the expected technical prowess, but also a genuine musicality and expressiveness.

That was equally true of the other contestants: accordion player Tom Orr from Lanark, clarsach player and singer Rosie Morton from Edinburgh, and the eventual winner. Their repertoires revealed considerable imagination in putting together sets that would show off the range of their gifts, including some self-composed material. It all added up to a headache for the five judges.

Kenny Mathieson