ENSEMBLE GALILEI
A Winter's Night: Christmas In the Great Hall
Maggie's Music (2002)
http://www.egmusic.com/

Ensemble Galilei is a classical-Celtic folk group from the Washington, DC area: Liz Knowles, Deborah Nuse, Sue Richards, Carolyn Anderson Surrick, and Sarah Weiner, playing strings, smallpipes, Celtic harp, tin whistle, oboe and recorder. A Winters Night is a pretty album of winter solstic tunes, recorded live in 2000 at a concert in Annapolis, Maryland.

It's easiest to pick the few familiar carols. "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" is played beautifully slow on low bass viol with oboe and harp and is followed by "What Child Is This?" The next track is two original tunes, peppy but discrete pizzicato and little finger cymbals followed by a pleasant uillean pipe/smallpipe duet with Kieran O'Hare and Deborah. The following item is a vaguely familiar and equally pleasant Irish dance tune set, beginning with "Bottom Of the Punch Bowl." It contains the usual session instruments, but also oboe and bass viol. So goes the album.

The "file under" on the back reads "Christmas/Early Music" and you would think the album...and the band itself... is crafted for the classical concert hall crowd. That's one of the paths it will take, but these women don't mind; they clearly love playing this way. You can't dance to the album, at least for very long, unless you abandon abandon, but notice Sue Richards right up there on stage with a odd grin plucking her heart into those harp strings. You can hear the passion rise in the tambourine strikes and sinuous oboe of Tschaikovsky's "Danse Arabe," as if it were Ravel's "Bolero" or the great Turkish power metal of Mezarkabul!.

Conversely, there's an icy pristine perfection, an aloofness, that prevents Ensemble Galilei from appearing at the Double Z Roadhouse, Polyesters, or O'Brien's Corner Bar. What is the social delineator here? The answer will have to wait as I am running out of room. But the recording couldn't have been made in any of these places because the quality is too good, perfect except for a few ill-placed coughed. In these bars, you would hear a definite inattentive rumble.

write: gennett on gorge net

The Columbia Gypsy