Journey to the outskirts

The Pilgrim | Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, Dublin

It is rare for major cultural events to take place in suburban shopping centres, but the retailers of this leafy outpost of Dublin, with various benefactors, have resoundingly bucked the trend. Shaun Davey's magnum opus The Pilgrim, premiÿred in 1983 as a Celtic suite for choir, orchestra, pipe band, rhythm section and various exotic soloists, has rarely been staged - with 250-plus people on the stage and with highly specialised solo instrumentation, the costs and logistics are daunting.

Originally conceived as a sequel to Davey's ground-breaking suite for uilleann pipes and orchestra, The Brendan Voyage, The Pilgrim multiplied its predecessor's concept of a single journey into a sprawling evocation of medieval religious pilgrimage through Europe, inspired by various ancient sources and personalities. With this idea as his vehicle, Davey incorporated the languages and musical traditions of Europe's seven Celtic nations into a piece that expanded the parameters of the orchestral form. Davey took the opportunity of a Glasgow performance in 1990 to rewrite the piece, honing a rough patchwork into a richly impressionistic tapestry of music and narration. Recorded for CD, that was its last public outing till now, bar one "unofficial" American performance, and, once again, Davey has used the opportunity for another overhaul.

The result was a joy. Featuring 10 new sections - four narrative, six musical - the work has now doubled in length to 110 minutes. Yet far from flagging in obesity, the whole has become tighter as a result. Much of its success came from the focus provided by a sharper, richer thread of spoken-word passages, narrated commandingly by Ben Kingsley. His breathtaking evocation of Davey's text, now drawn largely from the writings of St Colmcille, ached with the hopes and fears of journeying into the unknown, and mirrored Davey's work as a whole in breathing life into the very footnotes of recorded history.

Liam O'Maonlai of the Hothouse Flowers was a perfect choice for the windswept Irish-language vocal passages, with "Nessun Dorma" moments aplenty in the cart-wheeling melodies, while the Galician piper Carlos Nunez - reputedly the Jimi Hendrix of his instrument - brought everything into fifth gear towards a soaring finale.

One new movement, pitting a frenetic, cyclical motif from the highland pipes against an ominously ascending pattern from the string section, recalled the more ambitious moments of the Seventies fusioneers the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Davey's work certainly divides opinion, just as jazz-rock, or any fusion, has before - one man's brave voyager is another's crass populist - but he has created his own genre which has, itself, begotten the bastard offspring of Riverdance and its many derivatives. The maestro may not have reaped those rewards, but his work maintains a unique depth and dignity that others can only crave.