• Beat Root: Chris Wood & Trembling Bells

    September 17, 2016 - By 

    The contrast between the caustic avant-rock of Metá Metá and the acoustic, traditional folk that opened day three of Beat Root could not have been starker. Fiddlers Conor Caldwell and Danny Diamond have been playing together since their teens, though their professional collaboration as a duo is relatively recent. The duo presents material from its album, North (Claddagh Records, 2016), a reimagining of traditional tunes, beginning with the bouyant number ‘The Further in the Deeper’ by Donegal fiddle legend John Doherty, with the duo swapping the melody and rhythmic roles back and forth. A set of reels, ‘Drunken Wagn’er/’Over the…

  • Beat Root: Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh & Metá Metá

    September 14, 2016 - By 

    Back for its second year, Beat Root, Moving On Music’s festival of roots music, offered a program as diverse as imaginable, from harps, fiddles and thundering rock to singer-songwriter mastery and psychedelic folk.  Traditions, and the bending of them, were the constant dualities at play across four evenings of uplifting music, that taken together, amounted to one of Belfast’s best music festivals of the year to date. Though often associated with formal recitals, the harp can be one of the most expressive and one of the most thrilling of instruments – just think of Colombian Edmar Castaneda or Shetland islander Catriona…

  • Sestina @ Clonard Monastery, Belfast

    September 5, 2016 - By 

    The men of Sestina, Northern Ireland’s unique early ensemble are striding out on their own tonight, leaving the women, for now, in the wings. For this gender imbalance you can point an accusing finger, into the distant past, at various Papal decrees that forbade women singers in the church.Not good news for aspiring female singers of the time, though we should perhaps spare a thought for the promising young male altos, who were castrated in order to preserve their angelic voices. Today, happily enough, Sestina relies on natural talent as opposed to radical surgical manipulation for results. This concert, in the magnificent…

  • Altan w/ Kern @ Feile An Droichead

    September 9, 2016 - By 

    It’s undoubtedly something of a coup for Feile An Droichead to have persuaded Altan to play at An Droichead, a much smaller venue than is customary for the legendary group. Few trad outfits can boast the sustained activity and international appeal of Altan, who have been thrilling audiences around the world for three decades. The band will be celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2017, but in truth, an Altan concert at any time is a celebratory event and tonight is no different. First up, however, is Kern. The Louth trio has been together for nearly three years and its dashing…

  • Josie Nugent @ The Belfast Barge

    September 7, 2016 - By 

    Now in its eighth year, Feile An Droichead has worked its way quietly, and with little fanfare, to a point where this annual celebration of Irish music and language arguably ranks as one of the signature events in Northern Ireland’s burgeoning cultural calendar. Beyond the confines of its An Droichead home, the 2016 edition has seen the festival extend its reach into the wider community, with performances in the Ulster Museum, Black Box and the Belfast Barge creating, at the very least, the possibility of bringing traditional music to a more general audience. The honour of closing An Droichead 2016,…

  • The Pipes The Pipes @ Black Box, Belfast

    August 31, 2016 - By 

    The title may evoke a line from Frederick Weatherly’s famous ballad ‘Danny Boy’, but this multi-media project, where there are as many audio-visual artists as there are uilleann pipers, is about as far away from Irishry as imagined by sentimentalists the world over, as can be imagined. The music itself is traditional enough, though the printed program outlining the sequence and details of the twelve-piece set is more in tune with a classical music performance. Maitiú Ó Casaide, Leonard Barry and John Tuohy – the latter subbing for Padraig McGovern – deliver a set of jigs, hop jigs, slip jigs,…

  • Camino Na Sáile @ Ulster Museum, Belfast

    August 29, 2016 - By 

    “It’s important to do mad things. I don’t think it’s very wise not to do mad things.” So says Danny Sheehy, sagely. And what could be wiser than for a writer, an artist, a stonemason and two musicians to make a wooden-framed, canvas-covered boat and sail it, from Dublin, across a couple of seas, to join the route of the Camino de Santiago de Compostella? Sheehy is one of five wise men on the stage in the Ulster Museum, along with Glen Hansard, Brenden Begley, Brendan Ó Mhuircheartaigh and Liam Holden. Middle aged, weather beaten, grey haired, and with a…

  • Buille @ An Droichead, Belfast

    June 14, 2016 - By 

    Irish folk music, for the most part, remains strongly traditional. That said, it’s easy to forget that the ubiquitous bodhrán – an ancient instrument – didn’t claim widespread legitimacy in the Irish folk idiom until the 1960s, much in the same way that the cajon only filtered into the fiercely conservative flamenco tradition in the 1970s. Traditions evolve, even in seemingly diehard cultures, just as everything else in nature evolves. Buille, which means ‘beat,’ has danced to its own rhythms since it was formed by Cork-based Armagh brothers Niall and Caiomhin Vallely in 2005, releasing three albums of roots-based, genre-bending…

  • Bizet: Carmen @ Waterfront Hall, Belfast

    May 4, 2016 - By 

    Lust, jealousy, betrayal and murder have always made for potent story-lines and there’s undoubtedly something of the Greek tragedy about George Bizet’s much loved opera, Carmen. Yet despite all the ingredients of a modern-day soap melodrama played out to a stirring musical score – and all condensed into a couple of roller-coaster hours – the National Opera and Ballet Theatre of Moldova’s performance of Carmen comes across as conservative and a little stiff. There’s no doubting the success of award-winning director Ellen Kent, whose colorful staging of the world’s great operas and ballets has been packing them in across the…

  • LAU @ Duncairn Arts Centre, Belfast

    January 31, 2016 - By 

    There’s something about Edinburgh tables. JK Rowling’s scribblings at one in an Edinburgh café gave birth to Harry Potter and world literary domination. Likewise, when accordionist Martin Green, singer-guitarist Kris Drever and fiddler Aidan O’Rourke jammed at a table in Edinburgh in 2004, little did they know that those would be the first steps towards taking the folk world by storm. Twelve years, five critically acclaimed albums and a slew of BBC Radio 2 Best Folk Band awards later, LAU find themselves in demand at festivals, clubs and concert halls the length and breadth of the UK, in North America…