CABLED up to electronic briefcases like space walkers Martin Hayes (fiddle) and Denis Cahill (guitar) duelled at one moment in a gruelling virtually, then enmeshed themselves in a tumbling dogfight of colour and motion.
The fiddler was Jesus to the guitarist's back to front, milking cap, Man of Aran, visually each mimicked the other's role. The opening part of this two hour concert pushed dangerously to the brink of tedium in the sparseness of its laboriously dissected and gradually reconstructed dance tunes. Typically, a strangulated Colliers' Reel adorned only by a hesitant raindrop patter of plucked strings gave way to an intensifying Boy in the Boat, bellied to crescendo in with The Drunken Tinker.
Nothing was wasted: reversing the normal stage preference Hayes used wood laths over the stage carpeting to execute at times a delicate crotchet - percussion, cresting it out to a battering double beat in pulses of contrast.
There was no mystery, only an enveloping mystification: these players dealt with the ordinary in an extraordinary fashion: painting by numbers side by side with pointillism. This nowhere more spectacularly than in the concluding seamless half hour Lament for Limerick garland of metres and modes which drew the listener in on the familiar, enthralled with the full gamut of tone and technique. Sweet yelping, drawling double stop, precisely modulated, biting bounced bow, from a quiet quickstep into a unison guitar picked Skylark, a barrelling Bucks of Oranmore, a digging in on Eileen Curran, exploration and sundering of the atom on Star of Munster.
