Nobody seems quite sure if Celtic Connections is the biggest entirely musical festival in the world, but it must be a contender at nearly three weeks and with 1,500 musicians and about 300 events lighting up the long January nights in Glasgow.

For the first time in its remarkably successful 14-year history, the festival has a musician in charge. Donald Shaw, the originator of the band Capercaillie and with a hand in just about every manifestation of traditional music in Scotland, calls himself “artistic consultant”, but the principal programming is his and the choice of opening event is his too.

This has often been the weakest night of the festival, too many heroic but fruitless commissions in search of the elusive Celtic masterwork, too many top-class musicians all on the same stage for no very good reason. Shaw has not entirely avoided the pitfalls, although at least he has had a more plausible rationale. At the 2005 festival, just after the Asian tsunami, Andrea Zonn, a fiddler and singer from Nashville, began to approach musicians to take part in a benefit album for the victims. The resulting CD, Hands Across the Water, featured music from Scotland and Ireland alongside some good ol’ country and bluegrass from Zonn’s own background in Nashville, all recorded in unique collaborative arrangements.

Shaw’s laudable idea was to bring as many of these people as possible together in Glasgow for a one-off live re-creation of the album. It certainly made for an impressive line-up, with everyone from Beth Nielsen Chapman to the Irish band Altan turning up, and it also played to Shaw’s big idea for this year, which is to highlight connections with American roots music. In Jim Lauderdale, who launched into a full-on, rocking country number towards the end of the first half, and whose family, as his name suggests, left the village of Lauder in the Scottish Borders sometime in the 17th century, you very nearly had the whole evening summed up in one man.

The trouble with these things, though, is that they always end up being more of a cavalcade than a concert. It badly needed a more zippy master or mistress of ceremonies than the lugubrious Zonn and the even more laid-back guy from Compass Records — although for once the inevitable appeal to buy the album in the foyer seemed fair enough. And it could have done without the gloopy sentimentality that country music folk seem unable to resist, repeatedly urging us to believe what a “verrspeshl” project it had all been.

That said, there was some terrific music, impeccably stage-managed to get the various impromptu line-ups on and off with the minimum of fuss. If the highlight was Chapman’s extraordinary blues arrangement of the hymn from Sibelius’s Finlandia, it was only because it was so different. The other tunes benefited from the special arrangements and special musicians who were playing them, but they were more what one expects at this time of year. As a taster of things to come though — just about everyone has gigs of their own coming up — it was distinctly appetising.

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