Leo Rowsome – Classics Of Irish Piping (CD)

This Topic collection gathers the 78rpm sides of the king of the pipers, cut in London between 1926 and 1948 for HMV, Columbia and Rex, and first compiled across two LPs in the seventies. Rowsome was the towering figure of Irish piping in the first half of the twentieth century: master player, pipe maker in the family workshop, teacher to a generation that included Liam O'Flynn and Paddy Moloney, and a founder of Na Píobairí Uilleann.

Where the older piping style favoured the tight and ornate, Rowsome played wide open, driving reels like The Collier's / The Sligo Maid and the seven-part Frieze Breeches on full regulators, all rhythm and lift. Set pieces like The Blackbird and St Patrick's Day sit beside marches, hornpipes and airs in a programme spanning the familiar and the rare, remastered from original discs with sixteen pages of Seán Reid's notes in the booklet. The bedrock recordings of the instrument, from the man who kept it alive.