The Limerick Tumblers

LIMERICK Tumblers, a loose sequence of song, music and dance, celebrated the second anniversary of the Irish World Music Centre. The aims of this centre, led by Professor Micheal O Suilleabhain, are to blend local and international musical traditions and to preserve and renew Irish cultural expression within the global context.

To these ends, last Thursday Professor O Suilleabhain introduced a rich ensemble, of talented professionals who have recently become members of the IWMC. Ethnomusicology is alive and well and living in Limerick.

The nine part concert themed around the tumbling flight pattern of the Limerick Short Faced Tumbling Pigeon, offered an eclectic mixture Seannos and old style dance framed Turkish chanting, serial music rubbed alongside a newly commissioned set dance.

Kenneth Edge, on soprano saxophone, played with a soaring, lyrical clarity that ventured far into the territory of classical/traditional/modern fusion that the centre, seeks to promote. Edge is a remarkable musician. His composition, Aerdha, to accompany a dance performance by Daghda Dance Company, was an inspired accomplishment. The dancers, occasionally taking the Tumblers motif rather literally, added an aesthetic of shape and balance to the evening's performance.

The Irish Chamber Orchestra, as one of its several offerings, played Raymond Deane's Dekatriad for Thirteen Solo Strings. Since being premiered in this concert hall in April, the composition has been performed eight times, a rare event for a new work. Incremental repetitions mark a work that constantly shifts between tension and resolution. The Irish Chamber Orchestra, in a restrained yet compelling performance, hit the high point of the evening.

A share in that honour must also go to Sandra Joyce whose sensitive rendition of The Parting Glass brought the evening to a close. The old song, sung as if newly minted, signed a plangent benediction to the flight of The Limerick Tumblers. "I gently rise and softly call Goodnight and joy be with you all."