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Written in fRoots issue 338/339, 2011


SHAUN DAVEY
Voices From The Merry Cemetery
Tara TARACD 4023 (2010)

A new album from orchestral composer Shaun Davey with piper Liam O’Flynn and singer Rita Connolly is an occasion. The Brendan Voyage in 1980, which featured O’Flynn, was way back in 1980; Connolly joined the team for 1984’s The Pilgrim, 1985’s Granuaile, 1990’s The Relief of Derry Symphony, in 1992 Rita Connolly, and in 2005 May We Never Have To Say Goodbye. Here they are back, again on the faithful Tara label, on full form for a collaboration in Romania with the men’s choir of the Theological Faculty in Sibiu and orchestra.
     The title refers to the cemetery at the church of Sapânta in Maramures, which is known as the Merry Cemetery because it’s full of brightly painted, carved wooden grave crosses, each of which, under its pointed roof, bears a picture and piece of verse summing up, touchingly or sometimes humorously, the life of the grave’s occupant. The lyrics of twelve of the songs on the album are taken from those epitaphs; the thirteenth is a setting of a poem by Mihai Eminescu. One of the verses used, from the grave of Ilie, who died aged 96, goes in translation:
     “I am Ilie Petrenjel, a traditional musician and the oldest man in the village. The two Petreus brothers sang with me when we went to play in Baia Mare. I even made it to Bucharest with my old-style routines”.
     And from The Song Of Dimitru Holdis; Alcoholic: “The water of life is pure poison, she brings only tears and pain; she brought only this to me and put me on the road to death. Those who like a good skinful will come to the same end as me. I died with her in my hand.”
     The CD was recorded in a church in Maramures and cathedral in Transylvania, but the final concert, for The Long Road To Sapânta festival, was among the graves in the cemetery itself.
     Davey has a remarkable skill for creating memorable melodies woven from the shapes of tradition and orchestrating them into big, heart-lifting anthems. Here to set these plain-speaking verses he draws on Irish and to some extent Romanian melodic worlds, the choir and orchestra creating a rich-textured environment, full of light and shade, the robust-voiced male choir often opening a song which is then drawn to even clearer focus by Connolly’s glorious, truly regal voice and O’Flynn’s soaring pipes and whistle as orchestral lines twine and surge epically around them.
     A welcome return, from an unexpected direction.

www.taramusic.com. UK distributor Proper.

© 2011 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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