A Feeling in the Blood Claddagh Records****

Fiddle impersonation is hardly a career choice these days, but Néilidh Boyle (d 1961) had an uncanny ability to mimic everything from birdsong to the doom-laden sound of an oncoming train, conjured while accompanying a silent film. This latest Cairdeas na bhFidiléirí labour of love is a voluminous three-CD collection, the last word in archive material celebrating a formidable fiddler, born in the US, who returned to his parents' Donegal home at the age of eight. The distilled sweetness of A Stór Mo Chroíand the rapid- fire, acrobatic bowing in Boyle's reels add colour and shade, but it's the second CD, with Boyle expounding on everything from "devil's music" to the finer points of ornamenting a slow air that prove compelling. Boyle's unedited curmudgeonliness adds further to the Technicolour detail of this collection. The past is indeed another country, but one for which we still have passports. See donegalfiddle music.ie