NOTE (Wednesday, September 30, 2015): This article has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Noel Reid’s surname.

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Gailfean means “rough weather” in Irish Gaelic, so it might be called a happy irony that their first concert at Newtown Meeting House took place on a mild, lovely Saturday evening. However pleasant the weather outside, the music inside was even better, and the latest in the series of concerts put on by Fairfield County-based Shamrock Traditional Irish Music Society was a rousing success.

Gailfean the band, as opposed to the natural phenomenon, consists of All-Ireland Champion fiddler Brian Conway, All-Ireland Champion button accordionist John Whelan, guitarist Don Penzien, and singer and storyteller Máirtín De Cógáin.

Unfortunately, Mr De Cógáin was unable to perform in Newtown on September 19, being detained by an acting job, but a friend of the band, Noel Reid, a native of Athlone, County Westmeath, Ireland, now resident in New Orleans, was there to provide a few songs.

The concert started off with a pair of Paddy Taylor’s reels, played at a sprightly tempo that nonetheless sounded relaxed in the hands of three master musicians.

The next set was three jigs steeped in the New York tradition of Sligo-style fiddling which Mr Conway has made his own, and featured “The Bush on the Hill” from James Morrison; “Tell Her I Am,” a tune inextricably associated with Morrison’s fellow Sligo man, the legendary Michael Coleman; and “Scotsman Over the Border.” 

The next tunes were a pair of well-known hornpipes. John Whelan said he learned “The Cuckoo” from “the playing of the great Joe Burke, and I played it in my first All-Ireland in 1971. ‘The Western Hornpipe’ I learned from the late Paddy O’Brien.”

Mr Conway, on the other hand, got them from his old teacher, the late Andy McGann, a student of Mr Coleman’s and a hero of Irish music in New York in his own right. Their individual versions blended perfectly together along with Mr Penzien’s thoughtful, precisely placed chords and runs.

Mr Conway then took a break and Mr Whelan switched from his usual yellow accordion, made in Ireland by the Cairdín company, to his venerable, and heavy, red Paolo Soprani box for a set of reels from Finbar Dwyer, with the able support of Mr Penzien on bodhrán, the Irish frame drum. Mr Penzien switched back to guitar and Mr Conway returned for a lovely trio take on the 18th Century Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan’s Baroque-influenced composition “O’Carolan’s Concerto.”

Mr Reid, a retired NASA rocket scientist, then joined the others on stage to sing “Murphy Can Never Go Home,” a beautifully sad song about an aging emigrant, which he learned from Donie Carroll, a Cork-born singer who now resides in New York City.

“Usually when you call an Irish tune a song, it signals you’re a novice, but this one really is a song,” Mr Conway said, introducing his unaccompanied fiddle rendition of “The Bonnie Bunch of Roses,” the melody of a lament for the defeat of Napoléon Bonaparte. The air was followed with “The Boys of the Lough,” a Michael Coleman tune which Mr Conway learned at 12 years of age and played in his own first All-Ireland.

Mr Conway is one of the foremost Irish fiddle teachers in North America today. Two of his students, Cate Sandstrom and Lindsay Keating, came up from the audience to join him and Mr Penzien on “Bonny Kate,” “Jenny’s Chickens,” and “The Mason’s Apron,” a set featured on Consider the Source, Mr Conway’s Smithsonian Folkways CD. Ms Sandstrom and Ms Keating represent the latest generation to play the tunes which Michael Coleman taught to Andy McGann and Andy McGann taught to Mr Conway, and it is clear that the musical lineage will be in good hands for years to come.

John Whelan is one of the most prolific composers in the Irish traditional music community today. Mr Penzien and Mr Conway joined him in a graceful rendition of “My Ballingarry Lady,” a waltz Mr Whelan wrote in honor of his late mother, a native of Ballingarry in Thurles, County Tipperary, Ireland.

Mr Reid returned to sing “Ringsend Rose,” a beautiful old-fashioned song in praise of a Dublin girl who is “fairer than the flower I’m wearing... in God’s garden there’s none rarer.”

The concert officially ended with more Coleman tunes, “Lord McDonald’s” and “Ballinasloe Fair.” But no audience could bear to see such a fantastic show end without an encore, and the three members of Gailfean returned with a final set of reels ending in “Martin Wynne’s,” composed by and named for Mr Conway’s other great mentor.