Cormac Begley in Vicar Street review: milestone performance from concertina master

Irish Times

27-04-2025

Cormac Begley
Vicar Street, Dublin
★★★★☆
West Kerry has yielded more than its share of fine musicians and influenced many others far beyond its bounds. Its riotous polkas and slides have so often been sent skywards by box players whose formative years were spent propelling set dancers across dance floors from Ballyferriter to Ballydavid.
Cormac Begley
has chosen the concertina as his instrument and digs deep into the well of the tradition, mining new depths and scaling innumerable heights along his picaresque way.
Lemoncello support with equal parts apprehension and delight. Laura Quirke on lead guitar and vocals brings an unhurried, quietly confident tone to their short set of original songs, with Claire Kinsella on cello and vocals adding judicious and spacious colours to Dopamine, the product of Quirke's attempt at writing possibly 'the worst song ever written'.
It's a cool-headed, often ironic take on the tsunami of social media that defines these times, and a fine calling card for a duo who pepper each of their songs with insightful observations on life's incidental moments.
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Cormac Begley's performance took flight against a backdrop of carefully chosen visuals, with the concertina itself the recurring image, amplifying the visual aesthetic of this diminutive instrument that in his hands transmogrifies into a gargantuan, muscular propulsive force.
From the outset he lets the concertina bellows breathe deep and free, the lungs offering not only their notes but their breathy silence on O'Neill's Cavalcade, referencing the Battle of Kinsale in 1601. The concertina reaches deep into the heart of the tune, every turn in the tune amplified by Begley's expressive shoulders moving in concert with the notes.
The trademark Begley wit is undeniable and threaded throughout his performance. Drawing deep from the family well, he references his colourful ancestry, revelling in their innate rebelliousness and in his own inheritance of the family gene. The gifts of his bilingualism are woven seamlessly into the mix, with punning plays on his name, his lineage and his mischievousness.
Cormac's mastery of not only the treble and piccolo concertinas, but the robust bass and baritone ones too, imbues his tune sets with a remarkable spectrum of colour, with left and right hands bringing a strapping percussive force to the mix. The addition of a foot-controlled harmonium is a smart addition of a simple drone, bringing further heft to his sound palette.
His special guest, sean-nós dancer Stephanie Keane, is an able compadre, matching Begley's raw energy with her equally unfettered yet precision-engineered rhythms that find humour and grace within the notes.
Later, Breanndán Begley, Cormac's father, joins him on accordion for a gorgeously delicate take on Beauty Deas An Oileáin.
Fiddle player Liam O'Connor magnifies the boldness of the music even further with a set of tunes opened by Ryan's Rant, a nod to the late, extraordinary fiddle player Tommie Potts, allowing us a sneak preview of the pair's forthcoming album, which promises more feral music that traces a clear thread back to its roots, but with its sights firmly set on the future.
Cormac Begley's musicianship is akin to Flann O'Brien's policeman whose molecules had merged with his bicycle. At times, it was difficult to recognise the boundaries between musician and concertina, so fluid, freewheeling and unerring were the tunes.
This performance was yet another milestone in Begley's musical journey, filled with hairpin bends and delirious adventures.