THE piano is a stringed keyboard that works via a static keyboard. Yet great pianists like Ruth McGinley, who launched her new album last weekend at a Belfast Festival event, manage to conjure an individual sound.
For the concert at First Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street, McGinley played the complete track list of Irish songs or airs from her album Aura, all superbly arranged by Neil Martin. You sensed McGinley living each note. And there were some great ones in this beautifully Celtic concert.
There were 10 songs interpreted on the grand piano, starting with Boyle's Daughter, which was beautifully chilled in its reading of the song. The sounds here were almost jazzy throughout, allowing what McGinley called "the wee spaces between" to emerge.
Folk music, and we heard some of the finest examples, deals with life, death and an awful lot of unrequited love. The only song composed by Neil Martin and not part of the traditional canon was The Boy in the Glen, written to commemorate his late friend Liam O'Flynn, which included reference to a motorbike side-car as well as the landscape he loved travelling.
There is, of course, a great deal of loss and unrequited love. Possibly the most famous Irish air of all, Danny Boy, featured in the middle of Ruth McGinley's moving set. But as Mr Patterson noted, with maybe a tear in his eye (something affecting a lot of us in the elegant pews), the pianist was so skilful she made it sound like music we were hearing for the first time. She managed to do this while maintaining the much loved melody, which was cleverly slowed in places, and adding a wash of pianistic colour. The tune transferred briefly to the left hand but this lament and tale of undying love emerged fresh and relevant.
It was a very Celtic evening and at times, one heard echoes of Scottish folk song like the setting of Rabbie Burns's A Red, Red Rose. And the two cultures are related.
But we got frustration over unreturned love in My Lagan Love, a superb air with the refrain "For love is lord of all". The lovesick narrator recounts his journey by the river and how he steals a look at the beloved who has the night on her hair. It seemed to recall the modern poem by Seamus Heaney about a walk by the river with the girl looking like Bardot, Twice Shy.
The mood was unusually ambient as we heard glorious numbers like The Wexford Carol and to finish, The Women's Mountain. John Foxx, eat your heart out.
Ms McGinley, a Derry girl, lives each phrase and took us on a kind of emotional journey, revealing she'd recorded the album there in the Rosemary Street church. Radio 3 presenter Hannah Peel, originally from these parts, rightly describes it as exquisite and shaped by the Irish landscape.
One to treasure.
