Paddy Moloney/ Marco Frisina & The Vatican Orchestra: Silent Night: A Christmas in Rome (BMG)
Catholic Europe basks proud in this sumptuous Yuletide come-all-ye with Ireland's best-travelled leprechaun-piper enlisting the Chieftains, Carlos Nunez, the Glenstall lads and Maire Brennan and marrying them all to Monsignor Frisina's Vatican Orchestra and Choir of the Basilica of S. Giovanni. There's also a French tenor; the unbearable purity of Sissel's voice (Silent Night in Norwegian); an ear-bending Bulgarian choir and the Harlem Gospel people hand-whacking through Joy to the World, while the orchestra gushes out spooky filmic swells and the Vatican choirs are overpowering. If the ecstatic Christian bi-millennarianism is a bit much for you, as Anthony Clare once snootily said of Christmas-haters, you probably had an unhappy childhood.
- Mic Moroney
Connie O'Connell: Ceol Cill na Martra (Shanachie)
If ye had to dance to him, you'd be rightly lathered by this forceful fiddler from the Muscrai Gaeltacht near Sliabh Luachra: the slam rhythms, the four-note breaks in the jigs, the scratchy, strainy high rolls in the deceptively blunt, mature style. The material is a broad bag of slides, flings, six-part hornpipes and others lifted from Padraig O'Keeffe manuscripts, earwigged from the incorrigible Johnnie O'Leary, or dreamt up by himself. Solo or in belting unison with daughter Aine's fiddle and Eibhlin de Paor's flute, he machetes through the rambly thickets of Gary O Briain's strings and Brid Cranitch's piano in a boomy-sounding recording which relentlessly interferes with your neural circuitry.
- Mic Moroney