Between Worlds review: An enjoyable insight into the wonderful Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin
Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin was the subject of the Between Worlds documentary on RTÉ One.
Between Worlds not only represents the title of his work but the place where Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin felt “most at home, in the in-between space”, according to his wife, Professor Helen Phelan.
The Clonmel-born composer, who passed away in 2018, dwelt at a crossroads of musical directions, a turning point between innovation and tradition.
That Ó Súilleabháin bridged pop, classical, jazz, and traditional Irish music as pianist, composer and innovative academic at Cork and Limerick universities comes as news to few. But the personal insights into how those influences acted as tributaries flowing into a stream of musical creativity are illuminating.
From Suir to Shannon, on whose banks he established UL’s Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, the rivers that inspired Ó Súilleabháin run deep through Maggie Breathnach’s documentary.
Poignant reflections begin in Clonmel, where his older brother John recalls that within six weeks of Ó Súilleabháin following his lead into childhood piano lessons, the teacher, pointing at John, informed their parents: “You have a genius on your hands and it’s not that fella there.” Phelan relates how, after his early career as guitarist in Clonmel’s Beatles-inspired 60s group the Sea Cliffs, her husband experienced a moment of epiphany when introduced to Bach’s Brandenburg concertos, which “blew his mind”.
Trading in his electric guitar and amplifier to buy a record player and vinyl copies of the concertos represented “selling one culture to buy another” she says, the exchange informing his thinking thereafter. “He never wanted to have to do that again… he wanted to create a world of music where you didn’t have to choose.”
His long-time musical collaborator, sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, is among the contributors, as are Mel Mercier, David Brophy, and Ó Súilleabháin’s first wife, singer Nóirín Ní Riain, who takes viewers back to her first encounter at UCC with the blond, sharp-featured teenager formerly known as Mick Sullivan.
Coming under Seán Ó Riada’s cultural and musical influence at the university, both adopted Irish forms of their names and as a newly-married couple immersed themselves in Gaeltacht culture in An Rinn, whose song tradition is reflected here by a soaring rendition of Bean Dubh a’ Ghleanna by Ciarán Ó Gealbháin.
No hour-long programme could encompass a life’s work so vast in scope as that of Ó Súilleabháin, who in Ó Lionáird’s words “loved our culture so much and wanted it to be able to be appreciated within the highest possible echelons of art”, but it is that sense of cultural pride that shines brightest through Between Worlds.
