LITTLE ROCK — Celtic quartet Mithril and the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra had them dancing in the isles Saturday night at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall for a (slightly late) pops concert St. Patrick’s Day celebration.
Mithril - limber-limbed fiddler Tom Morley; flutist piper-fifer Andra Bohnet; guitarist Jonathan Clark; and percussionist David Hughes - headed up Bohnet’s arrangements for quartet and orchestra of airs, jigs and reels, most involving traditional Irish tunes or folk music with Irish ancestry and/or accent.
Successful airs included the haunting “Inishere” by Thomas Walsh and “Captain O’Kane (The Wounded Hussar)” by Turloch O’Carolan. Bohnet strung others together, as with the three-reel “Tommy Coen’s”/“Come West Along the Road”/“The Gravel Walks” set and the air-jig-reel trio, “The Ghost” by Liz Carroll tied to the colorfully titled “The Banshee’s Wail Over the Mangle Pit” and “Banshee Reel.”
A baker’s dozen colorfully costumed kids from central Arkansas’ O’Donovan School of Irish Dance added immeasurably to the post-intermission medley of “Merrily Kiss the Quaker’s Wife,” “A Fig for a Kiss” and “The Choice Wife.”
Melding the traditional tune “The Camel’s Hump” and “Purgatory Chasm” by Bill Black and Skip Healy into “The Celtic Silk Road” conjured up images of Irishmen traversing North Africa on camels (and we’re not talking Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia).
ASO board member Ron Petti joined the percussion section on chimes as the orchestra and Associate Conductor Geoffrey Robson played the fourth movement, “Midi,” from Hamilton Harty’s A John Field Suite. The orchestra, sans Mithril, also excelled in the English Folk Song Suite by Ralph Vaughn Williams.
Helping get the audience’s Irish up was a lobby preshow alternately featuring the O’Donovan dancers and a group of green-pint-sized fiddlers from the ASO Youth Orchestras, under the banner (literally) of the Shamrock Strings.
Mithril, Robson and the orchestra will do it all again at 3 p.m. today at Robinson Center Music Hall, West Markham Street and Broadway, Little Rock. Ticket information is available by calling (501) 666-1761 or at the website, ArkansasSymphony. org.
Arkansas, Pages 18 on 03/20/2011