Siobhán Long reviews two Winter Schools.
Tommy Peoples, Frankie Kennedy Winter School
Ionad Cois Locha, Dunlewey, Co Donegal
You could have heard a pin drop. It was as if all of Co Donegal was holding its collective breath for the homecoming of one of its own. Tommy Peoples was billed as a fiddle player, but on this occasion he played with Nureyevian grace, and with the weightlessness of a cormorant skimming the water's surface in search of sustenance. And if tunes had calorific content, then Peoples would surely have little truck with such pedestrian preoccupations as food consumption.
Having been primed by the fine sean nós repertoire of singers Sinéad and Deirdre Breatneach, Ionad Cois Locha greeted Peoples and his accompanist, Scottish singer/songwriter and guitarist Ian Smith, with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for victorious homecoming football teams.
Peoples' repertoire, generous and wide, visited reels borrowed from the Kilfenora Céilí Band (including a pinprick reading of Rakish Paddy), Jimmy Ennis and Charlie Lennon, and a share of Peoples' own pristine offerings too. From the slow air, The Fairest Rose to the impish hornpipe, The Rumour, he tiptoed his bow across the fiddle strings with a delicacy that few of us would have felt worthy of, and yet he was the one who mopped his brow repeatedly in an effort to still his pounding heart.
Smith's song cycle was an apt partner to Peoples' superb tunes. Letting his Scots blood flow free on Jock O' Hazeldine and Robbie Burns's My Love Is Like A Red, Red Rose, he found a comfortable space alongside Peoples, colouring and shading inside the ample space left by the fiddle's ego-free clean lines.
Co Donegal spoke softly through Peoples' highlands and reels. Although he's long left his home place, somehow its geography still exerts a hold on his playing. Unfettered by gratuitous decoration, Peoples' tunes soar with a sweetness born of wisdom and experience, rather than of saccharine.
Minimalism never sounded so divine.
Siobhán Long
Seamus Begley and Jim Murray, Frankie Kennedy Winter School
Ostán Gaoth Dobhair, Co Donegal
We should have known it was coming. We should have braced ourselves for the onslaught. Cannier souls than we might have had the foresight to don armour in anticipation of the mêlée they were entering. Because this was a wily three-headed beast to contend with: New Year's Eve, Co Donegal and Seamus Begley: any two-way combination could have been lethal, but all three together was enough to unsettle the hardiest of spirits.
Frankie Kennedy would surely have approved too. Begley had already tackled the drive from west Kerry to Co Donegal earlier in the day as if it was a sally across the shoulder of Mount Brandon. Once he caught sight of the midnight hour though, he was off with a gallop. Concertina-ing the set of slides book-ended by The Hare In The Corn and Dan Cronin's with a rake of polkas and hornpipes, he rendered the fine art of genteel listening redundant: there was nothing for it but to take to the floor and make the floorboards bounce along with everybody else in Gweedore.
Jim Murray, guitarist and supreme alter-ego to the manic Dingle aborigine, jousted and duelled with his partner with the knowing ease of a long-time compadre. And later joined by Richard Lucey, the box player from Ballingeary, they took turn after turn around the dresser as if possessed by some Hogmanay demons hell-bent on rattling as many cages as possible before dawn.
And so it careered onwards, perilously close to the Atlantic; a New Year's eve party to end them all. And barely a whiff of Auld Lang Syne could be found lurking amid the madness.
