A cousin of Paul Brady McElholm's style is similar but fresher and more contemporary in feel
A cousin of Paul Brady, McElholm's style is similar but fresher and more contemporary in feel. The reinvigoration that he brought has become a sight to behold.A couple of the Hanrahan songs, obvious crowd-pleasers, were played at the Empire along with a fair smattering of the group's instrumental back pages - many of them sets of "genuine" trad tunes appended with fiery originals in similar style - but the core of the set is McElholm's own songs, from the current album and, presumably, the next. Paul Roche, on flute / whistles, and Maurice Lennon, on fiddle, are all that remain from the original line-up but they are and were the group's key players. In 1993 Mike Hanrahan, songwriter and singer of the group's best-known Irish hit single "Walk Away", did just that. Other bands would have pulled down the curtain on a respectable career - one that had seen guest spots at Irish concerts by Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra - but Lennon's unbelievable enthusiasm kept the spirit alive long enough to find a replacement in twentysomething former UK Rockschool winner Eamon McElholm.
Three years ago, Stockton's Wing - a respected but, through an ongoing dalliance with drum kits, not universally revered name in the Irish traditional scene - were hanging on for dear life. Although the professional life-span of trad acts is closer to that of jazz (where age improves) than rock (where people sell lots of records today and disappear tomorrow), consumer boundaries are blurring and the marketplace will no longer tolerate complacency. Stockton's Wing (their name was plucked from a lyric on the first Bruce Springsteen album) had reached that point. That they have managed to turn their critical and commercial fortunes around through sheer hard work and the finest record of a 17-year career with the recent Letting Go is testament to both exceptional grit and enduring quality. The new energy, evidenced by a thrilling, occasionally incendiary performance at the Belfast Empire, is also to do with changes in personnel.
As a terse and introverted upbeat to the symphony, it worked rather well, even if some of the original quartet-writing sounded - in this strange collective guise - a shade fiddly in the wrong sense.. The Adagietto, instead of wallowing in schmaltz as it usually ends up doing, here sang with the simple loveliness of a Schubert song. A Mozart concerto, for instance, ought to be ideal but somehow isn't - the stylistic chasm is just too wide. Dohnnyi opted for a curiosity in the shape of Beethoven's F minor String Quartet, Op 95, arranged by Mahler for string orchestra. There was a downside: the shuddering orchestral convulsion following the work's opening trumpet call, for instance, seemed underpowered, and the scherzo's horn-call interludes missed the forest-echoing magic that they should have.