O Carolans Dream

CAL 9376

Who is Turlough O’Carolan? Another Ossian - but, he existed with certainty. A bard in short, blind - it is not invented - harpist, who surveyed Ireland and left behind an oral corpus which was quickly transcribed by his son and his friends. The result was 220 songs, the first edition of which appeared in 1748. • O'Carolan, too, was apparently a funny boy. Strong character and delicately black humor - for the record, his Lament for Charles MacCabe is the result of a dubious hoax around the death of a comrade! Anti-French too - it is necessary, and the era was not lacking! - as evidenced by his Miss Mac Dermott. Furious admirer of Vivaldi's music; and that of Corelli, too, whose Folia is cited here as a nod to several senses. • Count - because we have to come back to it - succeeds, with all these ingredients and in this conversation with O’Carolan, a model of cross-over, at the crossroads of Gaelic music and Baroque; laughter and tears; dance and death. This by renewing our listening habits, by exposing ourselves to surprising sounds, harmonics; thereby forcing us to listen. Always with the introspective, thoughtful quality that attaches to his wand - what a Fairy Queen; with the care, also, brought to the arrangements of the tarantella of track 2; with the flavor of the initial Mary O’Neill, its fiery rhythms, its festive percussions, its flutes in which so many mirages pass, its rough strings - and track 4, let's not talk about it! In short, if we still doubted it, it is possible to make popular without making vulgar - what it is always good to remember! • Benoît BERGER

CD x 1

Calliope

2008-04-15

794881878727