Pop Reviews : A Rowdy and Refined Set From the Chieftains at UCLA

The Chieftains’ recorded take on Christmas is one of the best since Phil Spector’s. The traditional Irish group’s new album, the holiday-themed “The Bells of Dublin,” would be a delight even without the plethora of celebrity guests laying down vocals atop the mostly instrumental band’s jigs and carols.

But anyone expecting a heavily Christmas-themed concert from the quintet on Saturday at UCLA’s Royce Hall was in for a more standard Chieftains show instead: Wry bandleader Paddy Maloney spent almost more time offering tongue-in-cheek plugs for the CD on sale in the lobby than he did playing numbers from it.

The quintet did open the show, as with the album, to the majestic recorded sound of the bells of Christchurch Cathedral Dublin; actor Burgess Meredith reprised his cameo from the album, reading a translation of a 19th-Century Christmas poem; bodhran player Kevin Conneff sang the lesser-heard-’round-these-shores carol “The Boar’s Head”; and their “The Wren!” medley featured a fast-stepping foursome of female dancers in beaked masks and costumes related to the festive St. Stephen’s Day (Dec. 26) tradition.

But, while fans of the new album might have offered a non-Gaelic bah humbug over the lack of any additional material from it, even a non-topical Chieftains appearance is about as fine a Christmas gift as a concert-goer could wish for--rowdy yet refined, historic and frequently hysterical, ranging from the exquisite beauty of Derek Bell’s somber harp dirge “A Farewell to Music” to Conneff’s irreverent, a cappella “The Salt,” about a flesh-hungry farmer. Cannibalism and Christmas, together again.

The Chieftains also appear on Tuesday at Symphony Hall in San Diego, on Wednesday at the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert, and on Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.