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DAVID BREMNER & MARK REDMOND - L’Air Du Temps / The Spirit Of The Times

DAVID BREMNER & MARK REDMOND - L’Air Du Temps / The Spirit Of The Times
Beal Music

L’Air Du Temps / The Spirit Of The Times offers to blend the seemingly disparate strains of the French Classical Organ School and the canon of Irish traditional slow airs. The musicians involved are pipe organist David Bremner and uilleann piper Mark Redmond, recorded in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. David Bremner is Assistant Organist at Christ Church Cathedral and is well-known for his advocacy of contemporary Irish organ music while Mark Redmond began playing pipes in 2001.

Their music involves traditional, classical and original elements which permeate a restrained grandeur. The sound of the church acoustics adds a formal atmosphere to the proceedings which aim to recreate eighteenth century Ireland and France, in which a period of upheaval and revolutionary ferment happened. This was also a time of influential cultural cross-pollination and the age of enlightenment which ushered in a new period of creative intellectual artistic genius.

The combination of church organ and uilleann pipes is unusual to the Irish tradition, certainly when used as a partial collaboration rather than a full one. In Brittany, combinations of organ and pipes have been used since the 1970s, the work of Ar Eminig – Alain Trouvel and Alain Le Hegerat - being an example in which the repertoire included religious hymns and traditional music. The tunes here are predominantly airs mixed with Baroque flavours and the interplay between organ and pipes on The Lament For Staker Wallace is suitably refined.

This is music to reflect on and digest as much as to appreciate for its strict formality and linear melodicism. Not your average traditional release, but one whose slow burning power creates its own idealistic space.

John O’Regan


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This album was reviewed in Issue 105 of The Living Tradition magazine.