Today's reviews include traditional music in Dún Laoghaire, the Farmleigh Affair in the Phoenix Park and Malcom Proud's organ recital at St Michael's
Paddy Glackin, Spiers & Boden
Tradition: DL Festival,
Dún Laoghaire, The Pavilion
SOLO RECITALS are a rarity these days, and a Paddy Glackin solo performance rarer still. Glackin played a pivotal role in the Bothy Band and, in tandem with Robbie Hannan and Micheál Ó Dómhnaill, he has recorded some of the most finely wrought duet music of the past three decades.
However, he has had surprisingly few opportunities to let his fiddle soar solo, as he did here, striking a triumphant opening chord in this year's Tradition: DL Festival in Dún Laoghaire.
Opting to use memory as his template for the performance, Glackin ambled through an eclectic set list that encompassed a pair of Clare jigs bequeathed by Elizabeth Kelly via her son, the fiddle player John Kelly, and a brace of the most clean-lined Sliabh Luachra reels: dainty music, as Glackin adjudged, borrowed from the playing of musical giants Denis Murphy and Julia Clifford.
The draíocht of southwest Donegal infused Glackin's gorgeous reading of Frank Cassidy's Tiarna Muigh Eo, an air suffused with the complex melodic and rhythmic shifts that summoned to mind another seminal air, Port Na bPúcaí from the Blasket Islands. Glackin's knife-edge precision and supreme focus resulted in a set of magnificent tunes, lifted delicately from their disparate home places to inhabit a nether world where county bounds hold no sway. A sublime snapshot of a musician in utter thrall of the music.
John Spiers and Jon Boden play English folk music as if they've just unfettered it from centuries-long chains. They seize fiddle, melodeon and concertina with foreboding intent, eviscerating the countless verses of Charles Morris (surely a distant cousin of Little Musgrave?) and transforming this epic tale of murder and loss into a morality tale for the Noughties. The Birth of Robin Hood shimmered equally, and the pair's transformation of Morris dancing tunes into visceral, heart-pumping balls of musical muscle was enough to make the stealthiest of anti-dance advocates revise their prejudices about that particular school of foot fancywork, at any rate.
It was a night that tasted of more, from start to finish. SIOBHÁN LONG
Farmleigh Affair
Phoenix Park, Dublin
"Good morning," compère Gerry Godley of the Improvised Music Company welcomed the small but dedicated crowd who had turned up for the start of the two-day Farmleigh Affair world music festival on Sunday. "There's no rain yet . . . this is very good. This is a 100 per cent improvement on last year."
In fact, the weather was so bad last year that Sunday's concert was cancelled. But while the rain did make several impromptu appearances during the day this time round, it failed to put a stop to events - or to dampen the spirits of the good-humoured audience.
That said, however, the opening set by Dublin's Mornington Singers was hampered by the day's early downpours. The choral group's arbitrary mix of everything from Arvo Pärt's Nunc Dimittis to Danny Boy did little to energise the audience as they huddled under trees and clutched umbrellas.
The rain held off for most of Irish traditional six-piece Gráda's set, an electrifying selection of traditional songs and new compositions with jazz-inspired inflections, even encouraging an impromptu kids' dancing competition.
The crowd had swelled by mid-afternoon, when Lisbon-raised Cape Verdean singer Carmen Souza gave a slick performance of chilled Afro-jazz songs from her Verdade (Truth) album. She was to an extent a victim of the laid-back family atmosphere though, for at times the music seemed as much a backdrop as Farmleigh House itself - and her many attempts to get the audience singing fell on deaf ears.
The New York-based eight-member Hazmat Modine were a different story: oozing cool, their bluesy, gypsy-inflected underground sound was entrancing, especially Wade Schuman's mind-boggling virtuoso mouth-organ solo.
Much of the crowd had dispersed by the time the final act of the first day took to the stage - but so too had the clouds. Slanting rays of sunlight shone on guitarist Justin Adams and Gambian one-string fiddle player Juldeh Camara as they treated the remaining few to an enlightening concoction of blues rock and African roots accompanied by percussionist Salah Dawson Miller.
Adams and Camara's collaboration has been going down a storm on the world-music scene, and their presence at Farmleigh Affair was a coup. Indeed, the free festival's impressive, eclectic line-up is proof that, while the organisers can do little about the weather, they've pulled out all the stops in every other respect. ÉIMEAR McKEITH
Malcolm Proud (organ)
St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire
Philips Passamezzo Pavana and Galiarda; Messiaen Apparition de l'Église éternelle; Bach Allein Gott in der Höh' sei Ehr BWV711, BWV676, BWV662, Passacaglia in C minor BWV582.
Malcolm Proud's organ recital at St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire got off to a slowish start. The Passamezzo Pavana and Galiarda by Peter Philips (circa 1560-1628) is a piece which takes its time without having anything special to say. In spite of some nice turns of phrase, it can easily sound too long for its own good, and in Proud's generally solid account, it did.
Messiaen's Apparition de l'Église éternelle is an early work from the composer's mid-20s. Proud treated its pulsating pedal-line and recurrent harmonic patterns as a kind of proto-minimalist exercise that was fascinating, if not quite convincing. From the gazelle-like spring of the first two-part chorale setting on Allein Gott in der Höh' sei Ehr, the music of Bach found Proud on home territory. The three chorale settings could hardly have been chosen for or delivered with greater contrast.
And the great Passacaglia in C minor, with which he ended, is the type of monumental work that Proud expounds with the kind of calm, ineluctable grandeur and certainty that can make his Bach playing so treasurable. MICHAEL DERVAN
