Friday, May 9, 2008

Traditional

The latest releases reviewed

VARIOUS ARTISTS Ceol Agus Foinn: Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy RTÉ Radio Na Gaeltachta ****

All human life is here to be savoured on this double CD. The Willie Clancy Summer School is the Mecca to which countless traditional musicians flock every summer. It's a melting pot where tunes are swapped and marathon sessions evolve into infinity. No compendium can hope to capture the essence of such amorphous magic, yet these 40 outtakes, spanning the light-fingered playing of Clancy himself on Rakish Paddy to the twinned fiddles of Junior Crehan and Bobby Casey in service of the genteel reel, Miss Wallace, go some way towards a Technicolor snapshot of numerous magical moments in time. Concertinas and singers stand out from the crowd, the former revelling in the space that such a tidy instrument can create amid the melee. www.rte.ie/rnag - SIOBHÁN LONG