Threads of influence colour concert green

The KSO’s Irish Rhapsody, performed in Kamloops and Salmon Arm over the weekend, proved to be a concert “more Irish than the Irish themselves,” as the old expression goes.

People tend to associate Celtic or Irish traditional music, or even modern pop artists such as The Pogues, Van Morrison or Sinead O’Connor, with the Emerald Isle. They don’t often think of small-c classical music as part of that rich musical tradition.

At first glance it may have seemed that music director Bruce Dunn was stretching the definition with this program. The concert opened with Canadian content, Howard Cable’s Newfoundland Rhapsody, and progressed to Irish Rhapsody by Sir Charles Stanford, who was born in Dublin but spent most of life and career in England.

The core of the program consisted of three works by Sir Hamilton Harty (1879-1941) — Ode to a Nightingale, The Fair Day and With the Wild Geese — yet Harty also spent much of his career in England. Dunn’s own arrangement, Songs of the Shamrock, completed the program, and he’s of English, not Irish, heritage.

Yet Irish Rhapsody was as thoroughly green as the green hills, filled with Celtic influences and musical references to Irish history and song, a testament to the Irish diaspora as well as to the compelling sweetness of the country’s melodies and rhythm.

Harty, after all, was distinguished by the Irish character of his music (he was sometimes referred to as the Irish Toscanini because of his equal affinity for conducting). Only Ode to a Nightingale — his musical setting for the John Keats poem sung by soprano soloist Ingrid Attrot — strayed from the St. Patrick’s fare. As music the piece is something of a period oddity, firmly fixed in the Romantic era, and I won’t rush out to buy a recording.

Cable’s rhapsody drew upon Newfoundland’s own Irish lineage. Harty’s A Fair Day was drawn from his Irish Symphony. With the Wild Geese is a haunting tone poem describing how Irish soldiers fought in the Norman Conquest. Here and there were the sounds of the harp, the pennywhistle and the bodhran.

Dunn, who has spent recent summers teaching in Limerick, said he’d been looking forward to the Irish tribute concert all season.

Audiences probably figured some of the country’s humour also rubbed off on him. In the last moment before the show they were asked to read a copy of Keats’ lengthy ode inserted in the program, then the lights were lowered momentarily in jest. Whether or not they understood the poem, audiences certainly came away with a greater appreciation of the Celtic conquest, the one musically manifested worldwide.

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