Music

The Gloaming

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

FIVE STARS

A man dreams about a beautiful woman and when he wakes up he’s miffed that she’s not there beside him. It’s a story as old as time, told in a fourteenth century poem, but its arrangement into the not quite so romantically titled Song 44 is the perfect example of how the Gloaming present the Irish tradition as forged-in-the-moment contemporary art.

This, the group’s second visit to Scotland but first time in Edinburgh, was a glorious coming together of pub session and concert hall performance, of improvised sound and colour and familiar dance tune forms, and of beautifully sung poems and not altogether poetically poised tune introductions.

Pianist Thomas Bartlett’s mirthfully compass-less effort at addressing the audience was about the only time he sounded unsure. His presence gives the Gloaming not just a wide harmonic canvas but also percussive shade and impetus. There are times when the two fiddlers, Martin Hayes and Caoimhin O Raghallaigh, players with totally distinctive tones, seem to phase in and out of the foreground or become a bowed rhythm section as Bartlett’s inventive touch, without taking over, captures the attention.

Hayes and O Raghallaigh are masters of the painterly approach, daubing brushstrokes behind Iarla O Lionaird’s calm, richly expressed singing, and also of the slow, teased out build. Tunes don’t so much gain momentum as swell in waves, with O Lionaird’s harmonium and Dennis Cahill’s subtle guitar playing adding to Bartlett’s backdrops. The net effect is measured, gradated and ultimately as gorgeously uplifting as it is sonically pleasing, with the fiddles fading into a kind of piano tone poem that left droplets of sound hanging in the air.