Arts Reviews

Decked out in shiny footwear worthy of the finest New York shoeshine, The Chieftains set a tone that was one part showmanship, two parts musical genius and, at least on Paddy Moloney's part, maybe one itty-bitty part chutzpah.

The Chieftains

ESB Beo Celtic Music Festival, Dublin

Headlining this year's ESB Beo Celtic Music Festival, The Chieftains' packed house said it all. With locals and visitors appearing to share equal billing in the audience, it was abundantly clear that the band's policy of multiculturalism has served everyone well.

The Chieftains' approach to arrangement is rarely matched, each instrument afforded a healthy space and yet ultimately shining brightest in unison. Moloney's pipes and whistle shared top billing, scaffolding their repertoire with his characteristically spirited and vigorous delivery, which reached ever skywards, particularly on the Cotton Eyed Joe set. Seán Keane's fiddle never fails to astound, his low-key personality a counterpoint to his steely playing, particularly on Jenny's Welcome To Charlie, and his regular sparring with Kevin Conneff on bodhrán offering evidence, if it were needed, of the pair's healthy appetite for pushing the outside of the musical envelope.

Matt Molloy too was in fine form, eventually letting his flute reign free on a set bookended by A Stór Mo Chroí and a sublime Colonel Frazer. At times Molloy's flute joined the rest of the band's instruments in a muddied soundscape, the combined forces of fiddle, flute and guitar melting into one another rather than sketching out their own track in the landscape.

Anyone who feared the absence of The Chieftains' widely loved harpist, the late Derek Bell, would have been buoyed by the contributions of Tríona Marshall, who tackled everything from Carolan's Concerto to The Long Black Veil, with occasional reversion to keyboards, effortlessly.

A Chieftains gathering wouldn't be complete without copious guest appearances, and of course Carlos Nuñez and his band's arrival was no surprise, given his headlining concert the previous night. Nuñez's beloved gaita (Galician bagpipes) found an able companion in Moloney's uilleann pipes, and the structure and discipline of The Chieftains' orchestrations proved the ideal antidote to Nuñez's tendency towards melodrama.

With Kevin O'Brien drafted in to add bluegrass guitar, Yvonne McMahon lending magnificent vocals to The Foggy Dew, dancers Derek Fahy and Paula Goulding offering occasionally mistimed steps and the young Dublin fiddler Seán McKeown contributing to a late take of The Flogging Reel, there was little room for loafers but, at times, too much for ragged edges.

With a handful of sets stretching well past their comfort zones (dilettantishly encompassing everything from Mo Ghiolla Meár to The Rocky Road To Dublin, via an irritatingly attention-seeking sample of the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction), at times it seemed that pleasing all of the people all of the time was the band's raison d'être. But, ultimately, the musicianship soared high and the tunes caught their listeners in a divine web of intrigue.- Siobhán Long

Stefano Vasselli (organ)

St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire

Stefano Vasselli, now in his mid-30s, is titular organist and director of music at the Episcopalian Church of St Paul's Within The Walls in his native Rome.

For his first appearance at St Michael's church in Dún Laoghaire, on Sunday, he offered a musical sandwich in which the familiar (Bach and Messiaen) enclosed a collection of rarities: three anonymous pieces from 18th-century Tuscany, a concert study on the Salve Regina by Raffaele Manari (1887-1933) and two works by living composers, Bruce Saylor's passacaglia on My Lord, What A Morning and Charles Callahan's improvisation on Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?

The fillers were all light, technically adroit pieces, the sort of thing one imagines that accomplished performer-composers can turn out by the yard.

This is a class of music that aims to put the performer in the limelight, and it was the study by Manari, with its abundant and eagerly filled demands for nimble footwork, that most successfully filled the bill on this occasion.

Vasselli showed himself to be a studious performer of Bach. His playing of the Prelude and Fugue in B minor, BWV544, was more revealing of how the musical lines fit together than of anything they might be intended to communicate. And in his handling of the Sonata in E minor, BWV528, he spent the first two movements presenting the music as a left-hand solo with accompaniments above and below, before adopting a more balanced approach in the last movement.

There was a distanced perspective, too, in Messiaen's Dieu Parmi Nous, where the always cleanly sculpted playing tended to emphasize the mechanical at the expense of the expressive. All in all, it was an evening more geared to the stirring of the senses than to any engagement of the spirit. - Michael Dervan

Steve Coulter

St James's, Dingle

The US harpist and sound engineer Steve Coulter has been cosseting a remarkable array of musical talent in Dingle in recent years, coaxing one of the finest venues in the land into the light, so that songs and tunes can be aired in the cosiest of surroundings.

This was as eclectic a line-up as ever: harp, hammer dulcimer, whistle, fiddle, guitar and banjo engaged in rapturous communion amid the rejuvenated floorboards and stone walls of St James's church.

Following a characteristically welcoming entrée from Coulter, Jon Sanders and Eilís Ní Chinnéide inhabited every ecclesiastical nook and cranny with their sinuous pairing of guitar and vocals, Ní Chinnéide shimmying her way through a set that tiptoed from An Páistín Fionn to the magnificently dolorous Cá Rabhas Ar Feadh An Lae Uaim? If ever proof were needed of the subtlety of the Irish language's ability to render the most elusive emotions real, this was it, and, aired by Ní Chinnéide's gloriously unforced larynx, every intricate phrase breathed wide and deep.

Sanders and Crickard have forged a heady partnership with their salsa-tinged partnering of guitar and fiddle. Crickard, all Northern edginess and quick-fire wit, has found his perfect foil in Sanders's laconic Kentish personality, each of them fired with an appetite for the impish (The Nine Points Of Roguery), the impatient (Páidín Ó Rafferty and Langstrom's Pony) and the unapologetically mournful (Martin Wynn's slow reel).

Dessie Kelliher joined the mêlée later, banjo in hand, armed with a fiery set of tunes and a comfort with improvisation that wouldn't have been lost on the most freewheeling of jazz musicians. Jousting with Sanders on a set that swing-shifted from cracking jig to careening two-step, we were left with no option but to succumb to the free-spirited madness of it all. Guitar and banjo entered a sublime synchrony in which only the truly comatose could have failed to delight.

Watching Kelliher mollycoddle his banjo as if it were an upright double bass, with strings well nigh vertical, the interplay between fingers, solar plexus and instrument (mediated intermittently by the brain, one suspects) was enough to keep the most impatient of mathematicians engaged for the duration of a half-decent grant's lifetime.

Church and state have rarely engaged in such elegant union. And that was despite, or perhaps because of, the gloriously hairpin bends that were navigated en route. - Siobhán Long

St James's is hosting traditional-music concerts on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays until the end of September. Bookings on 087-9829728