Donegal has exported some great fiddlers out of the county, including the Glackin family (to Dublin), Tommy Peoples (to Clare and Boston), and Danny Meehan and Con McGinley (to London)--to name a few. This CD was for me the first opportunity to hear another fine export, P.V. O'Donnell, who is now located in Connecticut (that's just east of New York City). He recorded eight albums with the folk-traditional band Barley Bree, and this is apparently his first solo album. It is a shame that he took so long to give a solo album to the public, as this is fine fiddling.
P.V. has very respectable technical chops as well as a traditional and very listenable style, and a sweet tone. As in the cases of, for example, Peoples and Meehan, one can hear in his playing influences both from his Donegal home and from elsewhere. His playing has the short bow and attacking bow style associated with Donegal. He also uses copious rolls and various touches that I imagine were picked up from here and there, including the occasional showman's flourish. (The result of years on the road as a musician, surely.) P.V.'s playing is not at the breakneck pace of some other Donegal fiddlers and is also very sensitive to the melody he's playing--it may be merely my imagination, but in these respects I hear interesting similarities to the style of James Kelly (who is himself greatly influenced by Donegal fiddling). To my ear, though, the Donegal influence is prominent. (The sound samples currently on P.V.'s website are fairly representative of the CD, I would say, but their sound quality of course is not as good as the CD's.)
The backing, restricted to guitar by Kevin Roach, is skillful but a bit on the loud side--Kevin could have held back a bit more, or the engineer could have put the guitar lower in the mix. This is not really a serious problem with the recording, though, and others would probably disagree with me--usually, I prefer to hear the accompaniment on CDs decidedly in the background.
P.V.'s selection of tunes (24 total) is another nice point about the recording. He does play quite a few standards in standard settings, such as the hornpipes "The Home Ruler" and "The Friendly Visit," the jigs "Gander in the Pratie Hole" and "The Black Rogue," and the reels "Farewell to Ireland" and "Man of the House" (and others); learning players will find the CD useful for that reason. But he also peppers the recording with some great Donegal tunes such as an unnamed reel sourced from Francie and Mickey Byrne (also recently recorded by Altan) and "The Gladstone" (actually a Skinner tune but played much in Donegal). There are a couple of Sean Maguire hornpipes played with fairly impressive technical polish. One of the nice finds here is "House in the Glen," a tune I had not heard before, which P.V. learned from his mentor in Donegal, Pat Mulhern. (As it turns out, I found the tune in O'Neill's but in a slightly different setting.)
P.V.'s notes on the tunes, while not very long, are interesting and heavy on content. His sources are very varied, from Seamus Connolly ("Sheila Coyle") to Hughie Gillespie (a friend of P.V.'s it seems; "Contentment is Wealth"), from the fine Donegal fiddler and newspaper editor Martin McGinley ("The Frost is All Over") to another fine Donegal fiddler, Tommy Peoples ("The Green Hills of Tyrol"). There is also an interesting biography from Seamus McBride. As to the more common tunes P.V. chooses, though Donegal settings of them exist, P.V. mainly plays them in more standard settings. His style is more closely aligned with Donegal than these settings, I think.
The CD has only 11 tracks but they average nearly four minutes in length, about 42 minutes in total. With so many longish tracks in a row (five of them over four minutes), the result in my case was that the music tended to recede, albeit very pleasantly, into the background--I had to rewind several times to re-listen to a tune that I didn't realize I had listened to.
This CD is strongly recommended to Donegal fiddlers interested in hearing another experienced fiddler from the county with a lovely style. I would also recommend it as a solid source to learn quite a few session standards in good settings.
Let's hope this isn't the last solo outing from P.V. and that he pulls out some more rare Donegal material on the next one!
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