This is another joyful recording from Open the Door for Three, a seasoned Irish-American traditional-folk trio featuring fiddler Liz Knowles, uilleann piper Kieran O’Hare, and Dublin-born singer, guitarist, and bouzouki player Pat Broaders. These nine tunes run the gamut from the spry “The Fairy Jig Set” to the soothing lyricism of “The Jackson and Jane Suite.” This popular trio is known for blending ancient Celtic-folk tunes (the Donegal reel “The Mermaid of Mullaghmore” and “William Glen,” whose lyric inspired the trio’s name) and featuring captivating contemporary melodies (“Celia Connellan”).
Advertisement
As a skilled player, Knowles can dazzle listeners with long-bow double-stops, in the rich Celtic-fiddle tradition, on such tunes as the jaunty jig “The Drunken Gauger.” And as a gifted composer, she dishes up lovely melody lines that elevate ancient tunes while giving them a unique flair. For example, “Feneen the Rover” finds her deftly weaving a filigree of delicate fiddle lines with O’Hare’s droning uilleann pipes. “Sometimes we might accidentally discover a great long-forgotten or neglected melody in a book, while other times we go deliberately searching for older, even archaic, versions of tunes we already know,” Knowles writes. “For A Prosperous Gale, my process was that I’dsit down with a collection of tunes like Breandan Breathnach’s Ceol Rince na hEireann, say, or 19th-century collections, like Joyce and Goodman, and start sight-reading through them from the very beginning. After playing through maybe a hundred melodies, what began to emerge were the tunes that were interesting, or completely different from anything I’d heard before, or even oddly familiar in a charming way. The point is that they provided a certain sound or texture or musical opportunity that we were looking for.”
Advertisement
