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.