Live music review: The Gloaming, National Concert Hall, Dublin

The Gloaming — Martin Hayes, Dennis Cahill, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, and Thomas Bartlett — return to the National Concert Hall after a couple years of triumphant touring and rave reviews. A supergroup from the word go, they have now become a phenomenon, mapping new territory for Irish music while always anchored to its history — stylistically, culturally, and, as is apparent in this room for the two-hour set, emotionally.

We begin where the new album (The Gloaming 2) does, with ‘The Pilgrim’s Song’. Ó Lionáird’s plaintive vocal is ageless, but the words are Seán Ó Ríordáin’s, and full of that poet’s modernity and dilemmas of time and place. A canny choice. We are further ushered from the shores of cliche by Bartlett’s piano, here an expansive horizon, giving a kind of cinematic nostalgia to the piece before it sweeps us off in a beautiful tune that is abruptly stopped in a final, stark Ó Ríordáin quatrain.

This is a fitting template for the rest of this performance: Equal parts intelligent, emotional, experimental, and faithful. At the centre of it lies Hayes’s fiddle playing: Rich, sweet, and majestically pure. Jousting with him is Ó Raghallaigh, a probing, angular, minimalist foil. When not at the microphone, Ó Lionáird adds another dimension from harmonium, while Bartlett is repeatedly an X-factor, extemporising at the piano.

After guiding us through their latest album, the group opt for what has become their theme tune for a finale. Familiar or not, ‘The Sailor’s Bonnet’ has rarely sounded better. Typical of the evening, it builds into something more rousing and rhapsodic than the album recording, and evolves from there to become a kind of trad-jam session, the musicians caught up in a moment of keenly aware, foot-thumping improvisation.

The group say goodbye via ‘Slán le Máighe’, an old Limerick poem of exile that is more formulaic and universal in its sentiments and lyric, perhaps, than what we have heard before it. But that universality extends to everything The Gloaming do. This is music for everyone.