Search - Aryeh Frankfurter :: Celtic Harp O'Carolan's Dream / Music of O'Carolan

Classical Celtic

Giordano Bruno | Wherever I am, I am. | 10/22/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Aryeh Frankfurter! Now there's a name that evokes the Celtic Mists! Almost as evocative as Mike Katz, the unrivaled piper of the Battlefield Band! And Frankfurter is every bit as virtuosic a harper as Katz is a piper, though their musical affects are as different as their instruments. Katz plays the rousing, inebriating, after-hours working-class stuff the Battlefield Band is renowned for. Aryeh Frankfurter is a classicist. He plays the music of Turlough O'Carolan with reverence and a high sheen of polished technique. His instrument, however, is not the 'clairseach" wire-strung harp O'Carolan would have played, but rather the nylon-strung "Celtic" harp invented in the 19th C, and the tradition of the modern Celtic Revival determines that O'Carolan's music should be played as gentle reverie, mistily twilit and Yeatsian. Whether O'Carolan would have played it so romantically is a tough question. I've heard harpers who played the clairseach with their nails, rather than their finger tips, and who treated O'Carolan as a barn-burning Baroque virtuoso. That's a different kind of music. Frankfurter's style and interpretation are intrinsically modern, his own, in a sense 'composed' music elaborating melodies by O'Carolan and his peers. Frankfurter also double-tracks some of his compositions, playing guitar, mandolin, fiddle, cello, tin whistle, and recorder in counterpoint to his own harp, a kind of studio legerdemain not available to the blind harpers of the 17th and 18th Centuries in Ireland.



I mention all that to justify my statement that Frankfurter's music is far more "classical" than "folk". Now hold your guns! I don't intend that as a criticism, just as a guidepost for listeners. O'Carolan himself was NOT a folk musician. Born in 1670, he was of the native upper class of an Ireland being expropriated by English landlords. Blind as a result of childhood smallpox, he found patronage that allowed him to study the harp. To describe him as a "wandering minstrel" gives an inaccurate impression. He traveled constantly, it's true, but not as a beggar. Instead, he performed at the estates of the wealthy, both Irish and English, and as his fame grew, he was welcomed with ample hospitality. He was well aware of the elite music and musicians of his era; his melodic structures and almost certainly his style of improvisation were strongly influenced by Italian Baroque styles. He was said to have met and played for the Italian composer Geminiani, who in turn played a Vivaldi piece for him. Track 13 on this CD - "Loftus Jones" - is Aryeh Frankfurter's most explicit rendition of O'Carolan as a Baroque-nik; it's modeled after a double concerto by Vivaldi, with Frankfurter's trope on mandolin.



Forgetting all that musicology, however, let's not fail to mention that this music is all mossy-green grace and loveliness. Music to soothe the anguish of dispossession by the 'Saxons'. Music to dream by, sweeter than clover honey, smoother than well-aged 'usquebaugh'."