A World of Fiddles Music Review

"I hope you like fiddle music," the renowned Irish fiddler Kevin Burke said at Symphony Space on Saturday. "It's going to be a rough night for you if you don't."

That invocation, puckishly disguised as a warning, kicked off "A World of Fiddles," a concert presented by the World Music Institute. And it had a ring of truth: Mr. Burke was one of five bow-wielding headliners on the program, along with Johnny Gimble, a Texas swing pioneer; Joe Cormier, from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia; Simon Shaheen, an Arabic music virtuoso; and Paul Dahlin, a preservationist of Swedish folk music.

What all these fiddlers have in common, besides the obvious, is the imprimatur of the National Endowment for the Arts, which has awarded about a dozen National Heritage Fellowships each year since 1982. "A World of Fiddles" was the first in a series of National Heritage Masters concerts running through the spring. (Next up: "Appalachian Journey" at Town Hall on Oct. 27, with Ralph Stanley and others.)

The evening's most dazzling moments were solo turns by Mr. Burke, who played his full portion unaccompanied, and Mr. Shaheen, who preceded his trio performance with a rich soliloquy. Both musicians made their instruments sing, highlighting its sonic possibilities while heeding an idiomatic design.

For Mr. Burke this meant ornamenting traditional jigs and reels with deft devices native to the Sligo style, like shuddering grace notes, pitch-sliding accents and double-stop sighs. Rhythm coursed through his playing, which often fluttered around an authoritative downbeat without needing to acknowledge it.

Mr. Shaheen employed a more flowing sense of pulse in his solo exhibition, a shape-shifting piece in a minor mode. His tone was dark and spacious, especially in the lower register, where he maintained a tonal baseline with one meditative drone. He used the higher reaches of the instrument for commentary, often delving into tense quarter-tones.

For the rest of his set Mr. Shaheen enlisted Najib Shaheen, his brother, on oud, and Michel Merhej on tambourine and frame drum. They played "Kahramana," a work by the composer Farid al-Atrache, as a vehicle for improvisation, and there again Mr. Shaheen excelled.

There was a more functional side to the hornpipes and jigs that Mr. Cormier whipped up with the guitarist Ed Boudreau and the pianist Lloyd Carr. It was music for dancing, ideally in some casual but courtly setting. The same held true for Mr. Dahlin, who focused on the waltzlike polskas of pre-modern Sweden with his wife, Marikay, on zither, and their son, Daniel, on fiddle. (A third fiddler, Joel Bremer, rounded out the group.)

Mr. Gimble, on hand to play the sprightly jazz-country hybrid he has carried on since his days with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys in the 1950s, didn't disappoint in the slightest. Backed by a band that included his son, Dick Gimble, he sang and spoke through a narrative of his own musical history, including the first songs he learned to play.

The routine felt shopworn, but the elder Mr. Gimble's playing was pinprick clear. And in the concert's finale, when every fiddler but Mr. Shaheen retook the stage, Mr. Gimble, 81, assumed an unimpeachable role as patriarch. "Some of them you'd probably call violinists," he muttered about his fellow fiddlers, leaving no room to argue the good of such pretensions.

The National Heritage Masters series continues through May at various locations; (212) 545-7536, worldmusicinstitute.org.