House Concert with MAEVE DONNELLY and CONAL Ó GRÁDA

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Arrive 7:30 or after. Concert starts at 8 pm, session to follow.  Bring a chair, an instrument and your favorite beverage!

Margie and John’s House
9 Robin Street, Pearl River, NY

For info – call 845-735-1204—or email reelwhisterl@aol.co.

MAEVE DONNELLY, a native of East Galway, has played fiddle since the age of five and won her first All-Ireland fiddle competition at the age of nine! In 1976 she was among 25 young musicians invited from Ireland to play at the Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife in Washington, DC. Maeve has been influenced by the music of older players like Peadar O’Loughlin (flute), Joe Cooley (button-accordion) and Willie Clancy (uilleann pipes), and has toured widely in the US, playing venues like New York’s Lincoln Performing Arts Center, the Washington Irish Fest, and the Catskills Irish Arts Week. Her debut CD was simply titled “Maeve Donnelly”. She recorded “The Thing Itself”, an absolute gem, in ’04 with mentor and friend Peadar O’Loughlin, himself a pillar of Irish music for six decades. In 2008 she recorded a stunning tour de force, “Flame on the Banks”, with guitarist Tony MacManus. Maeve possesses virtuosic technique and impeccable taste, and plays with a passion and exuberance rarely matched!

CONAL Ó GRÁDA, an outstanding flute player from Cork, made his first CD, “The Top of Coom,” in 1990 and it remains to this day one of the must-have CDs of Irish traditional music. From the first notes of the opening reel the power and virtuosity of Ó Gráda’s flute playing take your breath away and keep you in awe until the last note of the final track. With his recent and long-awaited follow-up release “Cnoc Bui,” Conal reaffirms the fact that he is one of the best flute players of his generation, and he adds another outstanding recording to that exclusive list of standard-setting CDs. All the more so because he chose a courageous path and made a true solo album, with barely a hint of bodhran accompaniment on a few tracks. His outrageously powerful tone and drive, and his dazzling technical precision may be what one notices first, but the unerring taste behind his personal approach to each tune is what leaves the most lasting impression.