Live Recordings from the William Kennedy Piping Festival

The 20 recordings on this 70-minute CD were made between 1997 and 2001 at the piping festival held each November under the auspices of the Armagh Pipers’ Club. In addition to the expected uilleann, Highland and Northumbrian pipes, the artists featured play a bewildering variety of less familiar instruments, from the Spanish gaita Asturiana and gaita Gallega to the Welsh pipe (cwd), the Italian ciaramella and zampogna and the Sardinian launeddas. This last, as played by Sardinian pipe master Luigi Lai at the 2000 festival, is a downright bizarre-sounding mouth-blown triple pipes with two chanters on melody and counterpoint plus a drone, requiring a circular breathing technique to keep all three going simultaneously. Included as a bonus track is ‘The Singing Stream I’, a piece for four uilleann pipes composed by Niall Vallely and performed by his brother Cillian Vallely. The quality of the recording throughout is impeccable.