Green days

Actually Atlantic had planned to release three Irish albums this fall, but Clannad's Lore, scheduled to be out last month, has been postponed to February. Which is too bad, since it looked to be one of their best. With half a dozen songs in Irish Gaelic (including one about Braveheart's William Wallace), a likely single in "A Bridge (That Carries Us Over)," another Native American-inspired track ("Trail of Tears"), and a continuing exploration of the links between Celtic and Native American music, it should be well worth the wait.

Clannad draw their synthesizer-heavy inspiration from an Ireland of mists and legends. Anúna are similarly echoey, but their sound derives from the resonance of stone churches. Think of a college harmony group singing Hildegard von Bingen and you get the idea. Their first album, Anúna (also part of the Celtic Heartbeat debut group), showed a remarkable range: medieval hymns, homophony from the Outer Hebrides, Thomas Moore, waulking songs, lighthearted Irish folksongs - and in three languages (English, Latin, Gaelic).

If Invocation is the slightest bit disappointing, that's only because it's simply more of the same, and after a while the modal harmonies start to pall. The Thomas Moore song here, "The Last Rose of Summer," has no body (compare it with the gorgeous Clannad version on Crann Ull), and the last verse is missing. The elaborate part-singing of Yeats's "Innisfree," on the other hand, seems almost fussy next to Loreena McKennitt's limpid, plangent arrangement of his "The Two Trees."

Throughout the women's solos are fragile blooms; Irish flavor is provided by low whistle, harp, and uilleann pipes, but there's also a lot of guitar. And the booklet is annoyingly inconsistent about providing lyrics: sometimes the original but no translation, sometimes the translation but no original, sometimes nothing, not even a mention of what language the song is in. If Atlantic hopes to build a serious audience for traditional Irish music, it needs to treat these releases as more than easy listening. (In "Sleepsong," "Codail begán" means "Sleep a little while" and "Uair ní hegail duit a bheg" is "So that you might fear no danger, little one.")

There's still a lot to be thankful for. "Quis est Deus," a slow, hypnotizing chant sung a cappella by a trio of female soloists, shows that even back in the seventh century people were asking tough questions ("Who is God/And Where is he/Of whom is he/And where does he live?"). "Winter, Fire and Snow," a setting of a poem by Brendan Graham, proves that material needn't be traditional to have bite ("In winter fire is beautiful/Beautiful like a song/In winter snow is beautiful/All of the winter long"). And the closing "Wind on Sea," a vision poem that's older than we can tell ("I am the depths of a great pool/I am the song of a blackbird"), features a violin that seems almost to be playing in a different key. This kind of imaginative reaching would make the next Anúna album even more treasurable.

Bill Whelan is no newcomer to the Irish scene: he's been a member of Planxty (where with Donal Lunny he wrote Timedance); he's arranged/produced for U2, Van Morrison, Stockton's Wing, Patrick Street, and more; he's written original music for 15 Yeats plays performed at the Abbey Theatre; he's set poems by the likes of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill; and his Seville Suite (available from Tara Records), about the Battle of Kinsale, shows how to integrate Irish instruments (primarily the uilleann pipes) into film-score orchestration. "Riverdance" was conceived as the interval act at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, and it's a corker: a hardshoe Irish dance number performed by Jean Butler, Michael Flatley, and a troupe of some three dozen stepdancers, all stamping and kicking through Whelan's irregular rhythms with mindboggling speed and precision. If you caught the Celtic Heartbeat showcase A Celtic Celebration on 'GBH last spring, you'll know what I'm talking about: "Riverdance" was the closing number.

It's also the closing number to Riverdance: The Show, which will be kicking up its heels at Radio City Music Hall March 11 through 17. Whelan has put together a 70-minute score of music and song and corraled some of Ireland's finest musicians, including Máire Breatnach, uilleann piper Davy Spillane, accordion player Máirtín O'Connor, singer Áine Uí Cheallaigh, and Anúna. But the river is our experience of life, and so this river runs all over Europe, from "Macedonian Morning" (with gadulka, a kind of Bulgarian fiddle) to "Marta's Dance/The Russian Dervish" (gadulka plus kaval - a Macedonian flute - dumbeq) to "Firedance" (Spanish guitar) and "Andalucía" (Spanish guitar, palmas, cantaor). It even flows into the Pond and comes out the other side as "American Wake (The Nova Scotia Set)."

What's missing from the CD is, of course, the visual component - though apart from "Riverdance" itself, the only sound of dancers' feet is on the "Reel Around the Sun" segment of the opening track. Surely the show will have more dancing - perhaps these tracks are only studio versions. Many of Whelan's instrumental compositions are danceable; you can hear the Riverdance rhythms wending their way through "Firedance," "Andalucía," and "The Harvest."

Whelan is a master of orchestration: even with gadulka and soprano saxophone, he's able to give "Macedonian Morning" a Celtic flavor, but then on "Marta's Dance" he gets a Middle Eastern feel out of mostly Irish instruments. With its slow harmonic changes and Davy Spillane's uilleann pipes, "Caoineadh Cú Chulainn" ("Cú Chulainn's Lament") hangs in the air like a hawk hovering, watching Ireland evolve over millennia. When Whelan puts words into the mouth of his river, it's less eloquent: "I am living to nourish you, cherish you/I am pulsing the blood in your veins/Feel the magic and power of surrender to life" (from "Riverdance"), or "How can the heart survive/Can it stay alive/If its love's denied for long?" (from "Lift the Wings"). When he lets it flow, as it does in the dance numbers, it's irresistible.

Máire Breatnach's new album has an irresistible title drawn from Máire Mhac an tSaoi's poem "Oíche Nollag" ("Christmas Eve"): "The sky outside is speckled with angels' candles." I wish she had set that poem instead of relying on her own compositions: "Éist" ("Listen") and "Aisling Samhna" ("Vision at Halloween") are heartfelt but thin. The former purports to tell us about Midir and Étaín, the most romantic couple in Irish myth, but the chorus is generic: "Listen, Love, there's music on the wind/And we will meet before the sun goes down." "Oíche Samhna," in which the singer meets a vision woman at the turning of the Celtic year, gives new-agey advice: "Listen to the voice in your heart and let it be your guide." There's no lyric sheet, original or translation, so you can just let Breatnach's breathy, engaging voice wash over you.

The other 12 tracks of Angels Candles (why it's not Angels' Candles remains a mystery) feature Breatnach's fiddle, but this talented lady also plays viola and keyboards. She's fine; what jars is the showband accordion and the monotonous strumming of her back-up guitar and bass, which bring her country-ish arrangements uncomfortably close to Lawrence Welk territory ("Beta/Carnival" and "The Gobán/Halloween Jig" are particularly painful). And though Breatnach likes to describe her compositions as portraying Irish myth, it's hard to hear anything of Midir and Étaín in "The Mystics' Slipjigs," or sea voyagers Bran, Maeldún, and Brendan in "A West Ocean Waltz" (the same problem beset her first disc, The Voyage of Bran - she should listen to the primal stuff the Galway theater troupe Macnas composed for the legend of Mad Sweeney). The program favors jigs, slides, polkas, and waltzes; a few more reels would give this disc some bite.

Quibbling is, of course, a luxury. It wasn't so long ago that "Irish traditional music" meant Joe Feeney warbling "Danny Boy" or "Galway Bay." Sean Ó Riada and the Chieftains and Clannad and Altan changed all that. Now we have a number of labels - including major player Atlantic - giving us artists who can sing in Gaelic, perform in authentic styles, and actually sell CDs. May their tribe increase.