Best of Both Worlds
Alan Brown presents BROADBAND - a celebration of popular music and song - each Sunday on Heartland FM from 1-3 pm, repeated on Tuesday from 9-11 pm
AS A FULLY PAID UP MEMBER of the DPMS - the Don’t Pigeonhole Music Society - it’s with great pleasure that I can announce the visit to Highland Perthshire of a man who has done more than his fair share of duty at the barricades. Since the release of his debut album in 1975, Irish composer and performer Mícheál Ó Suilleabháin has set out to bridge the gap between the worlds of traditional and classical music and you can judge how successful he’s been when he brings his unique piano style and arrangements to Pitlochry Festival Theatre on Saturday 12 March.
A native of the garrison town of Clonmel, he was a teenager in the Sixties and grew up with the pop sounds of that era. Going to study music at University College Cork, however, led him to discover the work of Sean Ó Riada, the great composer, arranger, academic and musician, whose groundbreaking Ceoltoiri Chualann group of musicians led to the formation of The Chieftains. It was a discovery which would be the key influence on Mícheál Ó Suilleabháin’s music. |
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He first came to our notice in this country in 1995 when he devised, wrote and presented the television series A River of Sound - The Changing Course of Irish Traditional Music which was broadcast by BBC and RTE and he has consolidated this musical success while at the same time juggling a career in academia; he was Lecturer in Music at University College Cork until 1994, when he took up his current position as Chair of Music at the University of Limerick and founder of the Irish World Music Centre.
But what’s so unique about his style, and - importantly - what will you hear at Pitlochry Festival Theatre? Well, you’ll witness a strange event in Irish - and Scottish - traditional music because Ó Súilleabháin uses the piano as the melody instrument in the piece rather than as a vamped backing to an accordion or flute or even banjo.
Trad/Classical Fusion
On this tour he teams up with guest soloists Niall Keegan (flute, whistle) and Sandra Joyce (vocals, bodhrán) representing traditional music, and a quartet from the Scottish Ensemble to help provide that all important bridge to the classical aspect.
Oh yes, and don’t expect an academic lecture between items. Ó Súilleabháin was chosen to open the prestigious Celtic Connections festival in 1998 in Glasgow and enthralled a capacity audience with a programme entitled Between Two Worlds.
I remember the concert vividly; an amplified grand piano centre stage and dry ice swirling in the coloured lights. Dry ice at a folk festival? Well, perhaps it was the dust from the old tunes. It could have been horribly pretentious, this Trad meets Classical thing, but he managed to make it sound as if it were an evening in front of the fire with some friends dropping in.
And are there really differences between the two worlds? Well, one thought which occurred to me at the Glasgow concert was that the members of the orchestra played exclusively from music scores, while the guests played by ear. Indeed, Ó Súilleabháin himself had his music in front of him on the piano but while he aped the absent-minded professor on one occasion as the next sheet proved elusive, he informed us “I’ve the whole piece in my head but this is just to impress you.”
The present tour was made possible by the Scottish Arts Council’s Tune Up programme, established in 2003 to provide funding to top musicians and artists to perform across Scotland. It places particular emphasis on more remote locations, and Pitlochry is the final concert in a week which will see the company perform in Islay, Inverness, Ullapool, Skye, Mull and Strontian.
It’s an evening not to be missed, with moments of classical perfection to please the ear, but with enough of the raw, earthy feel of traditional music to bring joy to the soul. In fact, the best of both worlds.
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