Far From the Hills of Donegal
Compass Records, 2007

There are perhaps two approaches to recording an album. The first is to get across one idea, one sound, rejecting other aspects of your performance practice in an attempt to explore and express one aspect of it as fully as possible. The other approach is to represent, on this fairly limited medium, as complete an account of one’s performance practices as possible. These are in reality two extreme approaches and most recordings end up somewhere between the two. This CD definitely lives very close to the latter, as here we have traditional and contemporary Donegal music, contemporary North-American style, European style ensemble, Scotland and various forms of Irish ensemble.

There are two potential and perhaps unavoidable pitfalls to this approach. The first is that the result can be musically schizophrenic, portraying too many competing musical personalities and not allowing the listener to fall into that comfort zone produced by the groove of a performance with some stylistic unity. This is striking from the beginning, with the startling contrast of the first track of fiery virtuosic, contemporary reels and the second, thoughtful and restrained set of flat single jigs in duet with Ronan Browne. This is certainly not a CD for comfort listening, each track presenting the listener with new challenges, asking us to re-evaluate traditional or neo-traditional performances in various contexts. Personally I love this, and can hear McAuley’s musical personality over all of it, but I could understand it not being everyone’s cup of tea.

The second pitfall is that in touching on so many approaches we are given the impression that the recording is derivative. On first listening this certainly occurred to me. For instance there are occasional flashes of Martin Hayes and Denis Cahill, of Altan’s Donegal unison fiddles, and one of the highlights of the album, the improvisations of Oisín and Peter Browne in 'Mary’s Waltz', which are reminiscent of the recordings of Ricardo Tesi and Patrick Valliant. However such a diverse album is bound to have many and varied influences and resonances. So much more of the recording speaks of a musician with a singular voice who has taken many aspects of contemporary traditional fiddle and ensemble performance, making his own, and more, of it. He creates his ensemble with the fiddle at the core and the main tool for development, but also extends the performance, growing out of the now overplayed use of unison fiddles. This is juxtaposed against some extremely tight ensemble playing, particularly with flute player Peter Molloy (track 11), which is accurate down to the level of ornamentation while never being uptight.

By successful negotiating these potential pitfalls, McCauley illustrates not just how virtuosic he is, but also the depths of his musicianship. In short I love this album. Sure, there a couple of sloppy moments during longer moments of intense virtuosity, but this just adds to the breathtaking joy of the recording where risks are obviously being taken. The tone of the fiddle is wonderfully reedy, consistent with the older sounds of south-west Donegal. Indeed, there is a lot of Donegal on this recording as is claimed on the press release (which, by the way, is a lesson in not letting publicists release information about you until you’ve read it – they’re tunes, not songs, and isn’t Carrick County where the Dukes of Hazzard are from?), but there’s a lot more of a musician successfully negotiating tradition and contemporary performance practice with startling success.

Inside Out
MORCD002

This second solo album from Mícheál Ó Raghallaigh reinforces the strong impact that he made back in 2001 with his début The Nervous Man. For his second album Ó Raghallaigh stays close enough to the formula that he used so successfully on that debut recording and in many respects Inside Out is a great album that gives us a picture of an artist who is playing right at the top of his game. Across fourteen selections of mainly traditional tunes, we get to experience the full array of techniques and effects that Ó Raghallaigh brings to bear on some of the heavy duty warhorses of the Irish traditional repertory. Aside from a jig by Paddy O’Brien and a reel each by Ed Reavy, Jim Donoghue (omitted from the copyright listing on the liner notes) and Vincent Broderick, Ó Raghallaigh sticks closely enough to mainstream sources such as printed collections, including Ryan’s Mammoth Collection, Breathnach’s Ceol Rince na hÉireann and O’Neill’s 1001 Gems. Other sources include personal contacts such as his father and other players such as Colm O’Donnell, Antóin MacGabhann and Larry Kinsella, as well as commercial sound recordings ranging from Dan Sullivan’s Shamrock Band to the Castle Céilí Band, Paddy Carty, John Williams and Moving Hearts.

Ó Raghallaigh has made some extremely fine choices from the vast storehouse of tunes that he has at his disposal and it is a pleasure to hear different kinds of energy and new life injected into the mainstream, the recently arrived, the relatively obscure and the superannuated ends of the repertory. A good example of this is track 6 which features the old reel ‘Colonel Fraser’ joined with two compositions by Reavy and Broderick. Ó Raghallaigh’s direct and dynamic approach to the music is well served by these tunes. Another and different side to Ó Raghallaigh’s musicianship can be heard in his rendition of the air ‘The Green Fields of Canada’, which is, curiously, the only solo unaccompanied performance on the entire album. His air playing is alternately robust, tender and delicate, reflecting in many ways the bitter truths contained in this classic ballad of emigration and loss which Ó Raghallaigh associates with the singing of the late Paddy Tunney. And yet another dimension to his playing, to my ear, can be heard in his tremendously vibrant approach to jig playing on the opening track ‘The Diamond Jig’/’Piper’s Chair’/’Maid in the Meadow’ and on the fourth track ‘Shandon’s Bells’/‘The One that was Lost’/‘Anthony Frawley’s’. These are great uplifting performances by any standards.

When I hear Mícheál Ó Raghallaigh playing I always get the impression that he is both fearless and deeply respectful of this music although, strangely, I also often wonder if the concertina itself is in danger of becoming more of a limitation on his musical ambition rather than an inspirational challenge!

Aside from the air ‘The Green Fields of Canada’, all of the tracks feature discreet and occasionally very fine accompaniment from Michael Rooney (harp), Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill (keyboards) and Eoghan O’Brien (guitar). The detailed liner notes are by Ó Raghallaigh himself and these are well researched, informative and include some useful brief information on the instruments that he plays. The odd quirky and humorous comment in the notes offer yet another glimpse of what’s going on inside Ó Raghallaigh’s very creative and energetic head, so the album’s title makes perfect sense!

Musica Jubilans: Sounds of Glenstal
Glenstal Abbey SDGCD 646

The beautiful, low-lying Normanesque Glenstal Abbey in Murroe, a short distance from Limerick city, is much else apart from the Irish headquarters of the Benedictines. It is also a boys’ boarding school numbering some 200 pupils, a part-commercial farm and a wholly commercial guesthouse. Necessity in recent years has quickened the Abbey’s engagement with Mammon in enterprising/surprising (delete where applicable) ways, with the most recent addition to its wares seeing the launch of its own branded dessert and liqueur chocolates – ‘A reminder,’ the monks’ website is quick to point out with cautionary propriety, ‘that, in origin, monastic liqueurs were intended to be drunk in small quantities as an aid to digestion’.

Equally effective, for both digestion and contemplation, has been the Abbey’s growing catalogue of own-label recordings. Initially concentrating on plainchant and liturgical choral music, more recently it has added organ recitals by noted improviser and scholar, and a Glenstal monk since 1983, Cyprian Love. Recommendable though this latest offering is on the Abbey’s full-bodied and robust Kenneth Jones organ (built in 1981 although some pipes date back to the middle of the nineteenth century), it’s unlikely that it will garner the attention accorded an earlier Glenstal disc featuring the distinctive vocal talents of one Marie-Bernadette O’Connor.

In truth, however, the absence of the Sister Formerly Known As Sinéad does little to dint the enjoyment afforded by this finely played, gorgeous sounding disc. Love puts the Glenstal instrument through its articulate paces with a programme that spans three centuries, from Clérambault and Bach to Pietro Yon and Flor Peeters, with free-flowing ease.

Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on B.A.C.H. opens proceedings with a thunderous flourish, Love nimbly weaving his way through its distinctively chromatic tribute with sure-fingered aplomb. Bach himself puts in an appearance with several works including an enjoyably idiomatic transcription of Vivaldi’s A minor Concerto for Two Violins (BWV593) and a brace of Preludes and Fugues, the alla breve Fugue of BWV550 brilliant and vital, BWV549 full of muscular, pipe-rattling drama.

There’s a splendid pulpit-thumping moment – marked ppp diminuendo on low eight- and sixteen-foot stops – in Reger’s Op 40 No 2 Fantasia that Love clearly relishes, its rather sepulchral, not to say murky, textures and tones lightened and leavened by Flor Peeters’ attractive Creator Alme Siderum with its luminous, high-pitched melody, and the gravity-free Toccatina for flute from Pietro Yon’s witty, tongue-firmly-in-cheek L’Organo Primitivo.

Two miniatures by Clérambault show off the organ’s dexterous way with the French classical tradition, while a delightfully understated Guilmant Noël on a traditional Polish Christmas Carol showcases its facility for lissom gracefulness. Widor’s rousing and perennially popular Toccata, with its improvisatory use of a single motif, still astonishing despite its familiarity, prompts Love to a rousing and obviously revelled in conclusion.

Beethoven Piano Concertos Nos 1 & 5, ‘Emperor’
Satirino SR063

Camerata Ireland’s lightly shaped, fleetly delivered Beethoven concerto series reaches its mid-way point with performances of the First and the Fifth, the noble Emperor, that bear the Belfast virtuoso’s signature flair for rhapsodic expressivity but surprise, too, with their self-effacing delicacy and over-arching tone of congeniality.

Polished is the word that immediately suggests itself here as Douglas and his cross-border orchestra of soloists deliver readings that verge, engagingly enough, on the translucent. Those who like their Beethoven big, broad and bracing may find some disappointment here, but those who recognise in his familiarly large gestures and fervent emotions a more considered and poetic mien altogether will find much to delight and dwell on.

Perhaps the most immediately remarkable aspect of this disc and its predecessor (which coupled the Second and Fourth Concertos) is how agreeably untrammelled Douglas makes the music sound. Certainly, there’s little hint of Beethoven trying to wrest the form away from Mozart in the early C major First, nor are we presented with an image of the Fifth as a work of mighty structural innovation and questing inventiveness. Instead we get two concertos borne along by a well-mannered warmth that thrust to the fore questions of conceptual accuracy and authenticity. It’s not immediately clear whether that is the intended point of these performances, but nor does it matter given the persuasive specificity of their execution.

Even as the suspicion grows increasingly insistent that Douglas sees both works as fully-fledged products of Romanticism in terms of the brute relationship between soloist and orchestra, he nonetheless allows the First to hurry itself along with an enviable Classical buoyancy on which he surfs with a sublimely graceful eloquence (calling to mind in the process no less a figure than Wilhelm Kempff) while the Fifth is delivered with a charmingly lithe and understated sense of the poetic that beguiles with its dancing suppleness.

Of course, one might object and wish that Douglas had intervened and imposed a little more. Or that the orchestra had contested and challenged him more energetically. Or, indeed, that the recording in the Mahoney Hall in Dublin’s The Helix had been framed more dramatically. But that might be to miss the point. I suspect that flesh and bone, grit and gristle, irrespective of what received opinion tells us this music ought to be ‘about’, is not what these slender, silky, seductive performances are intended to be concerned with or to convey.

The provocation here, it seems, is not merely to respond to familiar music, but to feel and think about it in an unfamiliar way. In that respect, this disc succeeds marvellously on its own terms. In shedding different light on Beethoven and new light on Douglas and Camerata Ireland, it is certainly worth investigating.

Schumann: Works for Piano, Volume 1
Claves 50-2601/02 (2 CDs)

Pianist Finghin Collins turns 30 this year, but this marvellously inventive and imaginatively realised first volume of a projected Schumann series, on the Swiss-based Claves label, reveals an almost preternatural maturing, the young Dubliner having first came to international attention in a flurry of Irish and international competition success in the second half of the 1990s.

Schumann featured all too fleetingly on Collins’ eloquently varied debut recital on RTÉ Lyric fm in 2005 (Impromptu, CD104) in the shape of the compact Op 18 Arabeske that made one eager to hear more. And here is more, in rich, overflowing abundance: two CDs’ worth book-ended by fantasy (the early Op 12, complete with the rarely-appended ‘Feurigst’, and late Op 111) and borne along in between on musical stepping stones that time has transformed into telling touchstones of the piano repertoire across which Collins lightly steps in a near-straight chronological line.
Such is the vivid portrait he offers of a composer for whom love was often dislocatingly whimsical, that it is a pity that this may well be Collins’ sole contribution to a ‘complete works’ project that is intended to run to six double-disc volumes, each, it seems, to be played by a different pianist.
No matter. We should be thankful for what we have here, and that amounts to something special indeed. While Collins’ wide-ranging resourcefulness in the concert hall has often suggested the makings of a very good all-rounder, it comes as a more than pleasant surprise to find revealed in these performances a facility that can dissect and reassemble so atomised a body of work as Schumann’s with such forensic and poetic care.

Collins shows himself especially adept at finding the apposite tone for Schumann’s quicksilver mood changes, especially noticeable in his realising the dual personalities that infuse the deliciously dreamy Op 12 Fantaisiestücke and the contrarily severe, thrillingly delivered Humoreske.

Equally arresting are the two major pieces that form the bulk of the second disc: Kinderszenen delicately nimble and love-lit with Collins rightly refusing to indulge dilute sentimentality, Waldszenen an impressionistic kaleidoscope tempered by magical nature and nocturnal mystery. In each he finds due attitude and multi-faceted characterisation, setting each down with a technical dexterity and emotional sophistication that impresses with every note. It’s a measure of the distance travelled in just a few years that the Arabeske heard here is marginally slower because more considered.

The directness of expression that characterises the approach throughout is beautifully framed by the centred and slightly forward placing of the piano in the warm, resonant acoustic of Lausanne’s Salle Métropole. If Collins is not to contribute further to this series, he has set the bar almost impossibly high for those who are, unenviably, to follow him, and in doing so he has raised himself into an a more elevated bracket altogether.