Fringe Music & Cabaret

Cathal McConnell & Friends

artSpace @ St Marks

FIVE STARS

Involuntary Noises – the Songs of Jody Trehy

Greenside @ Nicolson Square

THREE STARS

Stitch in Time: A Knitting Cabaret

The Safari Lounge

FOUR STARS

Rob Adams

He’s a treasure, is Cathal McConnell, and all the more so since he gives every impression that if he wasn’t playing onstage at St Marks he’d be making music informally at home or wherever else he happened to be at 2:30 in the afternoon.

Melodies just seem to flow from his flute and whistle, as they’ve done with one of traditional music’s longest running bands, the Boys of the Lough, for nearly fifty years, and although he describes the graphic Hunt of the Hound and the Hare as one of the most demanding pieces of music he’s ever encountered, his contribution, including depicting a yelping pack of dogs, sounds effortless.

In perfect union with the superbly steady fiddler Duncan Wood and cellist Christine Hanson, who brings long-bowed colour to airs and lightly propelled rhythmical momentum to jigs, reels and polkas, McConnell reaffirms here that, for him, music is for sharing. He plays with lightly worn mastery and a richness of character that signifies the handing down of tunes from the sources he always ascribes in his introductions.

He’s a generous host, too, giving Wood and Hanson, the latter with a lovely reading of Her Mantle So Green - learned, inevitably, from McConnell - opportunities to express themselves and as well as tunes, starting with O’Carolan’s Planxty Irwin with its gorgeous baroque embellishments, he imparts songs with his long trademarked charm and the very essence of storytelling, in an hour that passes all too quickly.

Runs until August 29.

Jody Trehy is an Irish soul poet in the tradition that produced Van Morrison and Paul Brady but with an added flavour of European theatre that hints at Bertold Brecht and Jacques Brel. His songs often seem to convey a sense of grievance and his onstage demeanour suggests that he might be more comfortable as the puppet master rather than his own mouthpiece.

The two best and most convincing moments come when he’s joined centre-stage, first by his backing singer, Amy Creighton, then by a performer from another Greenside show for the gleefully disdaining Business Song, both items thriving on energetic vocal synergy. A fine band, including violin and the inventive guitar work of Fionan de Barra, provides exactly tailored accompaniments and overall the impression gleaned is of a talent who has much more to offer rather underselling himself on the night.

Runs until August 29.

You don’t have to be a knitter to enjoy Stitch in Time: A Knitting Cabaret. Canadian Melanie Gall has done a power of research into the role of knitters in the war effort (both WW1 and WW2) and the large repertoire of songs that have picked up their stitches, and she’s produced a purler.

A trained opera singer who lets fly with a potentially glass-shattering aria at one point but otherwise majors on the resulting superb diction and fabulous vocal control, she has no end of statistics at her fingertips and knits songs both comic and sentimental into a pell-mell narrative that sags slightly in a couple of places but otherwise is by turns fascinating and very entertaining.

It’s worth going just to hear the mirthful, airborne, espionage-linked, Fuhrer frustrating adventures of The Pretty Little Mitt and even the pre-recorded backing tracks – there’s barely room for a Stylophone let alone a piano – won’t rip your knittin’.

Runs until August 31.

ENDS