The Swell Season in Dublin review: Not a dry eye on the balcony for Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová

The Swell Season – Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová

National Concert Hall, Dublin

★★★★☆

Saturday’s show is more than just another performance for Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. It’s a chance to remember old times and reclaim lost ground, an opportunity to dedicate songs to friends (Damien Dempsey, John Carney), family (Hansard’s young son, Christy) and other musicians (Billie Eilish, Van Morrison).

It is also, perhaps, recognition of relationships started in flurries of optimism and finished in squalls of despair. This is exemplified by the delicate ballad People We Used to Be, one of several tracks from the Swell Season’s forthcoming album, Forward, receiving its first live airing in Ireland.

Irglová, who sits at her piano throughout, takes the lead vocal on a semi-autobiographical song that outlines how, over time, the heart’s heavy bruising can disappear. “Things were easier once, when our hearts were light, we’d stay up talking late and put all the world to right,” she sings. “How I miss the people we used to be and all those things that you brought out in me.” Is there a dry eye in the house? Not on the balcony, there isn’t.

It was surely written in the stars that the pair would reunite for another outing. Hansard is a relentless seeker of collaborations, always on the mooch for a session or a singsong with like-minded musicians, and always true to his humane intentions. Irglová – the youngest ever winner of a non-acting Oscar for Falling Slowly, the song she wrote with Hansard for Once, the lo-fi indie movie from 2007 – is on a hiatus from her solo career.

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Of the two, Hansard is by far the more successful, but based on Saturday’s show we should never underestimate Irglová’s abilities to occasionally put a halt to her friend’s unbridled gallop.

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There are marked differences between the older and newer songs. Those from the Once years, notably When Your Mind’s Made Up and the still untainted Falling Slowly, embody young love in all its naivety, insecurity and commitment. The songs from Forward represent tension, doubt and a world in disarray.

Factory Street Bells talks of leaving loved ones behind, the Nick Cave-Bob Dylan hybrid A Great Weight Has Lifted obliquely references Gaza, while Irglová’s sublime I Leave Everything to You could be a lost tune from the Wicked soundtrack.

The pacing throughout the 140-minute set is deftly handled, from tender ballads to string-breaking guitar shredders, with covers (Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic and Gloria, Fergus O’Farrell’s Gold, a snippet of Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire) as well as spoken word (Stephen James Smith performing Talk to Me, his potent new poem). The show ends, unsurprisingly, with a bunch of flowers for Irglová and a collective thumbs-up for Hansard.