Lord, how time flies. Eighteen months ago, no one had ever heard of the Dublin Guitar Festival, and now, just two human gestations on, it is the biggest guitar festival in the world, writes Kevin Myers.
This is like Senegal planning a little fireworks display, and a year and a half later finding to its horror and bafflement that it is about to put a man on the moon.
The two main organisers, Mick O'Toole and Eric O'Leary no doubt originally intended a festival which would be little more than a few cheerful buskers strumming and plucking their chords, slapping their guitars, and generally being rather Iberian, but without the dead bulls. Instead, not merely have they become travel agents bringing guitarists from the corners of the world, and organising a dozen venues and a summer school, they are also having to dabble in the darkly recondite arts of meteorology.
Take the husband and wife team of Arty McGlynn and Nollaig Casey, who are performing their guitar duets in the National Gallery, not in the evening, but at 3pm, Saturday, July 2nd. But this is summer. The world, and the Irish part of it in particular, demands that July days are balmy and hot.
But not Mick and Eric O'Leary, the unfortunate lunatics who first dreamt up the notion of a guitar festival in that innocent yesteryear of not long ago. Who yearns to be indoors, when the sun is splitting the stones, and beaches beckon? Who wants to go into the centre of Dublin in the midst of a day-long downpour? Best of all is indoor impresario weather: a brisk, windy day.
Ah, but what about the many open-air concerts in Temple Bar? The sun is marvellous for them, the rain catastrophic, but the freshening wind which drives people to the National Gallery will soon disperse the crowd straining to catch the melodic cadences of a distant acoustic guitar. Oh, who would be a guitar festival organiser, when you also have to organise such complex weather patterns? The guitar is a class-free, ecumenical instrument, its genres meeting happily in the one metropolitan gathering in a way that is just about impossible for any other instrument. Imagine a piano festival which embraces the traditions of New Orleans, Chopin, Jerry Lee Lewis and Mrs O'Malley of the local céilí band, cigarette drooping from her mouth as she plonks her way through The Walls of Limerick. The Dublin Guitar Festival, however, is open to players of any tradition: flamenco, jazz, bluegrass, classical, Irish traditional, and the folk music of anywhere, in the rain or out of it.
How did such a festival become the largest of its kind in the world, as quickly as a pandemic sweeping the planet? South America grows guitarists as effortlessly as it grows Andes. In Spain, one only has to wander into the nearest grove, and luscious young guitars are hanging from trees, just ripe for plucking: hence Segovia. And in Mexico, even the burros play guitars.
Yet somehow or other the two organisers have managed to conjure one of the greatest accumulations of guitar genius ever known to Dublin, which one normally associates with guitars as one associates Kinshasa with whaling.
Mick and Eric could probably organise the cricketing world cup in Crossmaglen, with the main trophy to be awarded jointly by Slab Murphy and Queen Elizabeth II, while the quivering ranks of the First South Armagh Brigade, gathered in martial array, weep with royalist fervour.
The guitar festival has certainly cast its net around Dublin in a rather more forceful way than it did last year, when certain venues managed to wriggle free of the organisers' greedy gaze. For example, the splendid hall at Vicar Street has been recruited for service, as have many others, including Trinity College Chapel and the Goethe Institute, and of course, the National Gallery, plus God's Great Roofless Spaces on the streets of the capital, providing ample opportunity for the organisers to reveal their meteorological inventiveness.
That other god, the guitarist John Williams, blessed the O'Toole-O'Leary project with his genius and his presence from the outset, and last summer gave a truly mesmerising performance in the National Concert Hall. It was one of those nights of sublime music when ancient follicles, long since forgotten in the deeper recesses of the hypodermis, began to tingle and pulse, and unsuspected hairs began to march up and down on one's forearms, like Roman legions setting out to conquer Gaul. This year, John Williams is joined in concert by Richard Harvey, one of these amazing multi-instrumentalists who can who woo a magical mazurka from some concrete, two pats of cow-dung and a length of Madonna's dental floss.
However, on the night of June 30th, he'll be accompanying John with some rather more conventional instruments.
Now I have known Mick O'Toole for a long time, and a finer man I do not know; so fine is he indeed that he is probably not praying for the right sort of weather for his own concert with his colleague Alec O'Leary at Trinity College Chapel on June 29th, at 1.10pm, but instead is squandering his meteorological supplications on behalf of others.
So let me here enjoin those on high for grey but clement weather that day. For Mick and Eric are truly brilliant guitarists - combining serious intellect with superb technique and quite outstanding musicality.
Finally, they beseech me to draw your attention to Xuefei Yang, a quite dazzling young Chinese guitarist playing at the National Gallery on July 3rd, at 3pm. (Pray for a light drizzle).