St Patrick’s weekend saw the latest of Martin Hayes’ experiments with traditional Irish music, and one of his most ambitious, as he played three concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra (under Gavin Maloney). This experimentation has been part of Hayes’ sound for many years now. The Gloaming introduced musicians from different musical traditions, the Martin Hayes Quartet included a bass clarinet, and he released The Butterfly with the New York string quartet Brooklyn Rider in 2019. Tonight’s concert is not even the first time Hayes has performed with an orchestra: in 2010, he gave a concert with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra that included the premiere of Dave Flynn’s thirty-minute fiddle concerto Aontacht. But in his memoir Shared Notes, Hayes writes that working in this context could be constricting. In this run of shows, then, he takes a different tack: most notably, the music emerges out of a project he’s already been involved with: the Common Ground Ensemble, his most recent band and with whom he released the 2023 album Peggy’s Dream, which continues Hayes’ exploration of instrumentation by including musicians from jazz and the avant-garde. The music tonight consisted of traditional tunes whose setting and performance Hayes has honed with the Common Ground Ensemble, with the orchestration by the band themselves (primarily Cormac McCarthy and Kate Ellis).

I don’t think you could hope for a result more musically successful than Flynn’s wonderful Aontacht, but by working the music out more gradually and by playing tunes rather than Flynn’s precise score, Hayes might have hoped for something less stressful. The trouble, though, is that for the musicians surrounding Hayes to give him more freedom they must interact with him less; and this carries the risk that they interact so little that you wonder if they contribute anything. One then gets a sense of the musicians playing merely in parallel. But finding a middle way here – or, if you will, finding common ground – is precisely Hayes’ journey, and I am always eager to hear the results of his experiments.

Brian Donnellan, Martin Hayes, Gavin Maloney and the National Symphony Orchestra (Photo: Mark Stedman)

From myths to dreams
Friday’s concert opened with the Irish premiere of McCarthy’s Of Myth and Mundane. This work for orchestra without Hayes, which incorporated material from traditional dance music and sean-nós singing, had plenty of nice melodic passages: the opening flute-and-harp duet; a melody in the lower range of the violins against pizzicato in the low strings and soft off-beat pulses in the woodwinds; a tune brought to the marimba and subtly pushed to the background as brass thumps created a foreground groove – this last a particularly effective inversion of the relative priority of melody and rhythm in traditional music. The work was marred, though, by structural unevenness and awkward transitions between the sections, and so lacked overall shape.

The remainder of the concert was a series of tunes, almost all from Peggy’s Dream, by Hayes and his bandmate Brian Donnellan (concertina and bouzouki) to orchestral accompaniment. For many of these tunes, the orchestra spent a lot of time being a glorified drone, and no doubt this light touch gave Hayes the musical freedom that he found lacking in his experience with Aontacht; but as feared, I found myself wondering if the effect might not be as easily achieved with a set of uillean pipes.

In fairness, the orchestra did more than this. Even its drones often had plenty of little details such as the richly voiced harmonies in the opening tune ‘Aisling Gheal’; elsewhere, various instruments took up fragments of the melody or accented key moments. It had humour, too – the brief xylophone run on ‘Hughie Travers’ Reel’ forced a chuckle from me. The approach taken in ‘The Longford Tinker’ was different again, and I was impressed by the constant inventiveness of the orchestration in this piece. Finally, Kate Ellis’ orchestration (this is the only tune where Hayes was unambiguous about who was responsible) of ‘O’Carolan’s Farewell to Music’ was superb: playful and daring, cross-cutting the harmonies and rhythms of Hayes and Donnellan’s tunes. The orchestra became an independent but complementary partner rather than merely a support and provider of ‘grandness.’

Martin Hayes and Brian Donnellan backstage at the NCH (Photo: Mark Stedman)

Unsettled
Despite these moments of interest and even brilliance, I was, on the whole, unconvinced. This was made vivid to me in the long final set of the concert, in which tutti and solo passages alternated, and I found myself physically refreshed when the orchestra stepped back and I could hear the pure musicality of Hayes and Donnellan’s solo passages (it almost goes without saying, as I have never heard Hayes play and not be stopped in my tracks, but tonight was no different).

Worse than unconvinced, I was positively unsettled. At one point in particular (an extended transition to ‘Peggy’s Dream’), the music became saccharine, Hollywood, and drew out of me thoughts about Hayes’ status as a ‘national treasure’ and the political nature of that status. A symphony orchestra is an immensely prestigious institution, an internationally recognised symbol of prestige and civilisation. Hayes performing with the NSO, especially on the weekend of St Patrick’s Day and with President Higgins in attendance, makes Irish traditional music, and its position in Irish society, legible – and so is a political act of soft-power projection: of selling ourselves to ourselves or to anyone who would be reassured by knowing that our anarchic traditional music has been made professional and reliable. For this political act to succeed, it doesn’t much matter if the music doesn’t work as music: the important thing is that it have sufficient polish and pomp. I don’t claim that anyone involved in this run of concerts explicitly thought this way, but whenever the music fell short, the concert felt under-rehearsed or the collaboration seemed unmotivated, I wondered who this spectacle was really for, and what drove these musicians together. Was it a concert by musicians, for music lovers, because the music called them?  Or was it a mere mélange of our inheritances? Because that is not enough.

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