Trad with a twist

`We're an educated society: we know about racism; we know about environmental issues. And we have a choice." Sitting in a tent on European Boulevard at Hannover's EXPO 2000, Dominic Campbell, artistic director of Bacchanal Theatre Company and newly-appointed artistic director of the St Patrick's Festival, was speaking for many. As I made my way to Bacchanal's street show in a banana yellow cable-car, taking in Ireland's pavilion neighbours, including Italy's white flying saucer-cum-car showroom, Estonia's blue shimmering cube topped with large carrots and baby Christmas trees, Lithuania's fever-yellow 1960s giant computer, Monaco's dank pond and bobbing yachts ("No Swimming", warns the sign, in case any aquatic leprechauns might be visiting), it had seemed that few deep thoughts could be prompted by our participation.

In fact, our stylish, subtle pavilion, designed by Murray O'Laoire and Orna Hanly to show two faces of Ireland - undressed stone reflecting the traditional and rural, and polished limestone reflecting the modern and urban - as well as cultural director Fiach Mac Conghail's interrogative arts programme, keep making Dominic Campbell's point: that the discovery of a balance between the old Ireland and the new is crucial.

Mac Conghail's programme for Ireland Day on Wednesday tackled the same question in artistic terms, by putting at its heart a contemporary twist on traditional music. He went out, deliberately, to confound traditional German perceptions of Ireland, and to confound the home-grown spin on Ireland summed up in the name of EXPO's Irish pub, "Molly Malone's Celtic Tiger". He wanted a programme which was, as he says, "rooted in the tradition", which was contemporary, but not wrapped in the candy-wrapper of commodification. And so he gave Donal Lunny the orchestra he asked for (the Irish Concert Orchestra) and commissioned a new piece of music - the only new work for a National Day at EXPO (brass bands and young women in traditional costume seem to have been the cultural attractions offsetting the main business of trade at most pavilions).

While Shaun Davey's The Brendan Voyage, performed to acclaim on Monday night, is essentially a conversation between the orchestra and the melody of Liam O'Flynn's searing uilleann pipes, Lunny's Duiseacht (Awakening) actually uses the orchestra to voice a romantic lament. His many-voiced composition makes a beautiful and powerful wash of sound, but still I longed for the traditional clarity of one melodic instrument. It was when the percussion took off, a gaggle of drums led by Lunny's bodhran, that the piece, as its name suggests, really woke up and developed a relationship with the orchestra's lament, like that of African drums with jazz melody in Cuban music. Syncopation and sweeps of orchestral music built to a dramatic close, which drew whoops from the crowd.

Lunny can't read music and used a computer to compose this, his first piece for an orchestra. He now says he thinks an orchestra "can be brought very close to the authentic voice of the tradition - can augment or expand a melody, realising it in a harmonic way that resonates with the tradition", and much may come from this fusion.

The important thing, according to Lunny, is to follow the "intelligence" of traditional music. Sadly, much of the Concert Orchestra's programme of treatments of traditional music on Monday seemed to belittle this intelligence. Works like Herbert Hamilton Harty's The Fair Day, Gerard Victory's Revel in Reel Time and Leroy Anderson's The Irish Suite seem to trap the rural tradition in the drawing-room of urban convention and make it look small. For me, only The Last Rose of Summer worked, Jonathan Rees's sweet and slightly vibrato violin singing against the wash of the orchestra, probably because the song was meant for drawing-rooms in the first place.

By contrast there was, as Mac Conghail puts it, "no competition" between traditional music and the orchestra in Donal Lunny's programme of music on Wednesday. Nollaig Casey (fiddle) and John McSherry (uilleann pipes) interpreted his 1997 piece, Omos, which saw the melodic instruments lamenting the Famine against the orchestra's background. But putting a virtually unknown seannos singer, the young Roisin Elsafty from Connemara, on an open-air stage in an EXPO plaza with the design values of Stillorgan Shopping Centre on a freezing morning took real courage.

She freely negotiated her ornamentation on that volcanic expression of love denied, Coinnleach Ghlas an Fhomhair, and the orchestra, under Prionnsias O Duinn's watchful baton, followed with gentle breaths of violin. This background gave the voice the body it needed in such a situation, and proved Elsafty right in trusting Lunny enough to break her vow - made some months ago on this page - never to sing with accompaniment.

The expression of pain is surely the genius of Irish traditional singing. Even the joyful songs seem to spring from pain. The wellsprings of that pain seemed so easily reached in an Ireland which still suffered from war and mass emigration. The Romanians, in their pavilion made of steel scaffolding and ivy, might be forgiven for asking what we're mee-hawing about now, as we sit behind our polished limestone, desperately trying to recruit workers to feed the "keltischen Tiger". That may be difficult, because while plenty of Romanians may dream of "bas" or even "beatha in Eirinn," many of the Irish young people working in the pavilion would prefer to stay in Germany, for the trams and trains alone: "Why would I go home when here I have the city at my fingertips?" asked one.

He couldn't begin to relate to a sean-nos song about the pain of emigration, and the question has to be asked: is the tradition still relevant? Veteran Dublin singer and song-collector, Frank Harte, who provided musical interludes in an evening of readings by poet Eavan Boland and prose-writer, Dermot Healy on Tuesday, rivetted the audience with I Am Stretched On Your Grave: "Calling out to the air with tears hot and wild/ My grief for a girl that I loved as a child." For him the songs are "the record of our people" and furthermore, they will always continue to be so. He delightedly quotes an example of up-to-the-minute ballad-making: "My name is David Trimble/ On my backside there's a pimple . . . It's just a little orange pimple . . ."

By contrast, Lunny thinks Ireland's long narrative of pain may be nearly over. He thinks the tradition will remain, however: "It will translate into the expression of real beauty, of compassion, of sympathy."

We're back to Dominic Campbell's choice again, which he and Bacchanal set out in their theatre piece, Hand over Fist. A kind of visual poem to a soundtrack by percussionist Tommy Hayes and live vocals by Bronwen Hayes, it pits whirling trees against people whose heads are shoved into toy cars, while little pigs on wheels weave in and out (they wanted to let 50 live piglets loose, but saw sense). A strange postman on stilts delivers his mail, which becomes an ill-assorted couple: a girl in a saucily short Irish dancing costume and wedgies, and an astronaut.

Will they embrace or won't they? It's not as simple as that, really - it's how they embrace. There has to be some hope in the fact that Ireland's cultural programme at EXPO has tackled this question and has portrayed a country in such a state of rapid transition that it does not know what it is: "There is the official version," says Mac Conghail, "and the German vision. And then there's us, you and me. And none of us can agree."

EXPO 2000 runs at Hannover until October 31st